Phoenix Noir

by Patrick Millikin

  Eddie once again saw his best friend for the last time. Knockoff Ray-Bans over that fuck-a-duck grin, undiminished by a junkie-thin frame and the chemicals oozing from his pores and soaking his Doctor Who T-shirt.

  “Got us a caper, bro,” Wade said, dropping beside Eddie and extending his fist for a bump. “Easy peasy, lemon squeezy. Scoping VIN numbers off junkers, waiting in line at the DMV. Dude I know, his sister’s into some Armenians who’re tossing out serious Franklins for bogus registrations.”

  Eddie had gone schizophrenic. He had become two people. Inside Eddie wanted to grab Wade by the shoulders, bust the remaining Chiclets out of his grille, and scream at him to run. But Outside Eddie was doing the talking. Cool and laid back, an actor ghosting through lines perfected in a single performance six years ago.

  “Maybe I got something better,” Eddie said.

  “Better how? That’s like free money, bro.”

  Eddie opened his hand on the vial. “This do?”

  “Dude! Beats waiting in line every time.”

  She straddled his lap, backlit by purple neon, grinding as the Red Hot Chili Peppers caterwauled about Californication. Her face was so close he could taste butterscotch from the candies she chain-popped between sets. They were in a private VIP booth, their love lounge.

  “It doesn’t have to be this way,” Cheryl said, voice husky. “You can make me yours, for all of the time.”

  “You don’t belong to me,” Eddie said. “You’re Wade’s. He loves you.”

  “Wade ain’t like you, Eddie. He’s weak.” Cheryl arched her back. “I hear things. I’m afraid he’s going to get you busted. Or worse. He’s not the friend you think he is.”

  It would take Eddie years to wise up to Cheryl’s lies and manipulations. He couldn’t see his hands in the dark. But he knew how his fists would one day smash her face.

  “You always get what you want?” he said.

  “What I deserve, you mean.” She stroked him.

  Eddie closed his eyes.

  “Open your goddamn eyes, boyo!” the old man barked. “You owe her that much.”

  Eddie obeyed, blinking into focus a cheap pine casket atop a floral-strewn dais. Inside, rose-colored satin framed his mother’s deflated features, rouged and painted into a plastic sheen. He and the old man were alone in the mortuary. “She looks pretty much the same as the last time you beat her,” Eddie said. “Only happier.”

  “Is that why you came here? To lay blame?”

  Eddie really couldn’t say. He wanted to mourn her, but the only genuine sentiment he’d been able to summon for his mother was conflict. A fitting eulogy. “Guess I wanted to make sure she was finally safe from you.”

  “Jesus, but you’re a weak sister.” Eddie could hear the alcohol burn in his father’s pitiless voice. “No way you came from me. I knew the moment she spat you outta her cunny lips I wasn’t your father. But I gave you my name anyway. Know what they call that? A legacy.”

  “Swell legacy, Dad. Look what you did for her.”

  “What about what you did, Eddie? The shame you put her through. The way you took advantage of her. You forget about that? Need me to remind you?”

  “Shut up!” Eddie swung at the old man, who deflected the punch and clamped Eddie’s jaw in one meaty hand. Squeezing, he pushed Eddie against the casket, crashing over vases, toppling arrangements, and scattering blossoms across his mother’s body.

  “Let me clue you in, boyo. I gave your mother what she wanted. You call it battery. She called it love. We made our peace a long time ago. How about you?” The old man pushed Eddie’s head toward his mother’s, crushing his face onto her lipstick-encrusted mouth. “Here’s your chance, Eddie. Tell her you’re sorry. Kiss her goodbye.”

  Pink underwear kept Eddie from escaping America’s toughest jail. Well, maybe escape was overblowing it. Security was so loose he could’ve walked out the front gate.

  But then he wouldn’t have access to pink underwear. He couldn’t believe the money he was making off the things. Hell, he was wearing three pairs at a time just to keep up with demand. And supply? Eddie was kicking back to the laundry crew so they’d keep quiet on the count.

  Putting inmates in pink underwear was the brainchild of the Maricopa County Sheriff, who thought degrading men by forcing them to eat green bologna sandwiches, watch the Disney Channel, and work on chain gangs made him America’s Toughest Sheriff.

  Of course, the sadistic fuck also built a jail out of tents on the floor of the goddamn Gila Desert. And on that one, Eddie had to give the sheriff props. Satan’s front porch had nothing on a thousand men crammed ten to a tent in 120-degree summers.

  Eddie processed into Tent City a couple of months after his nineteenth birthday, which he’d celebrated by racking up a misdemeanor assault charge and causing a near riot at a Mesa bar. Charges would have been worse except when police arrived Eddie was being stomped into the ground by a group of seriously pissed off vatos. Seems Eddie had inflicted a grievous insult to their culture when he cold-cocked one of their homies then shoved his hat under the pachuco’s ass and asked if that was where the candy came out.

  Eddie thought he should send the greasers a complimentary pair of pinks. He’d gotten the idea for his underwear caper from a stroke rag, some freak of nature writing about how she got off when her boyfriend gave her the Dirty Sanchez. If chicks were willing to brag about licking their own shit, what would they be willing to shell out for an inmate’s dirty drawers?

  Anybody could sell clean boxers. In fact, Eddie was pretty sure the sheriff had a side business doing just that. What he offered was lived-in stuff. Pissed in, shit on, cum-filled and bloody, the messier the better. He had Wade set it up with a classified and a post box. First week, they got a dozen orders. Doubled it the next week. Finally had to bribe a couple of deputies to get the boxers out.

  Eddie felt like a captain of friggin’ industry. Escape. Are you kidding?

  “Knuckles, bro? Fury. That some kind of promise?”

  “A reminder. Finally stood down the old man.”

  “Righteous. He back off?”

  “Nah. Kicked the shit outta me.”

  They were barreling west on U.S. 60 in a Lexus that Wade had boosted from a movie theater parking lot, where they had just seen Starship Troopers for the upteenth time. Wade geeked over science fiction. Eddie didn’t mind. It gave them somewhere they could go together and disconnect. For them, sci-fi wasn’t a theme. It was a place.

  “Remember when we use to fly paper airplanes off the Alma School overpass?” Eddie said. “Like we were X-wings making a run on Death See if we could make it to the pavement before getting crunched.”

  “Yeah. Till you taped an M-80 to one. Nearly caused that trucker to jackknife.”

  “Man, I’ll never forget that dude’s face.”

  “Funny stuff, Eddie. Long time ago.”

  “Not for me.”

  Eddie’s body devolved. The pain was exquisite. He saw his muscles thin out and flatten. His limbs shrank. Broken bones snapped fresh, bulging under his skin, then fused together as if they had never been broken at all. Tattoo blue vanished. He could literally see his manhood fade as he slipped into adolescence, his life clicking away like slides in an old-style View-master, the selector switch set to suffer.

  He tore through the boy’s pod, his clothes, books, finally fingering the three-by-five picture under the mattress. Eddie hated the boy. He was a pampered puss, a crybaby. One of those kids who didn’t think he belonged in juvie, no matter his crime.

  The picture proved it. Family Vacation 101. Silly smiles backdropped by Arizona red rock, the boy front and center, arms draped around a bored little sister and brainiac brother. Mom and Dad flashed peace signs over their heads.

  The boy treated the picture like a piece of magic, rubbing it through his pocket, peeking glances and talking to it when he thought no one was watching. It only made Eddie hate him more. It confirmed that whatever the boy had done, it would eventua
lly be forgotten. Not so for Eddie. The picture people knew it. Their smiles ridiculed him.

  Eddie dropped the picture on the floor between his feet. He unbuttoned his pants and began jacking off.

  The old man came out of Eddie’s bedroom wagging a pipe and baggie. He was dressed in his police uniform and he put the weight of the badge behind his voice.

  “You’re a walking felony, Eddie. Guess it’ll be Christmas in Durango for you,” he said. “I’ll process you through intake myself.”

  Eddie held the old man’s eyes. Kept quiet even as his father shoved him bodily into the back of the patrol car. What could he say? The pipe wasn’t his. Neither was the dope.

  “Go ahead, Eddie. Cry entrapment. Tell them how I planted the evidence. Nobody’s going to hear anything you say.” The old man cranked his head back and laughed through the metal cage. “Done you same as we do the niggers. Nobody hears them either.”

  Desert twilight crept like a sepia claw toward the end of the hallway where Eddie cowered outside of his parents’ bedroom. He strained to hear the voices on the other side of the door, primed for violence.

  He knows. Eddie screwed his mind down on the thought, rejecting it. Impossible.

  Then the door opened and the old man loomed over him in the shadows. Eddie tried to look past him to where his mother waited in the room. Surely she would defend him. He was just twelve. How could it be his fault? “Mom?”

  She averted her gaze, giving him up to the old man.

  “Shhh, boy.” His father’s face cracked into an indecipherable jigsaw of emotions. Eddie could see anger, fear, and hate clamoring to escape. “She can’t talk to you.”

  Slowly, the old man raised his fist, showing Eddie the torn and frayed lamp cord coiled around it like a whip. “This is going to hurt you a whole lot more than it will me.”

  The old man let it out then, a shrieking fit of laughter that grew louder with each successive crack of the cord, until even Eddie’s screeches were lost to it.

  “I’ll protect you. I swear.”

  “Just hold me.”

  “Like that?”

  “Put your hands down. Lower.”

  “Here?”

  “Lower. Oh, that’s nice.”

  “Can I kiss you?”

  “Please. How does that feel?”

  “It tickles, kinda.”

  “Now?”

  “You’re soft.”

  “Don’t stop.”

  “Why are you crying?”

  “Because you make me feel beautiful.”

  “You are beautiful.”

  “And you won’t ever hate me, Eddie?”

  “Never.”

  “And you promise you won’t ever leave me?”

  “No. I love you, Mom.”

  Eddie crouched beside a yucca, unable to pull his eyes from the girl’s window. He’d imagined squalor and Third World filth, a ghetto repackaged into an East Mesa ranch house. But the girl’s room shined pastel princess beneath decorative fixtures, all canopy, ruffles, and lace.

  It looked, well, normal. They lived better than Eddie. Not like niggers at all.

  The girl, whose name was Rhonda and shared Eddie’s sixth-grade class, glided through the pink and white fairy tale, her face a caramel question mark beneath a frizz of black hair. Eddie resented the fluttery feeling she gave him. He wished she were white. He’d followed her home to prove to himself that she wasn’t worthy of his affection, to see the urban decay her kind would bring to his neighborhood, the way his father always said.

  Voices charged him in the darkness. “Peeping mother-fucker! Get him!” Eddie was lifted off his feet and thrown into the yucca’s spiny fronds. He could see faces in front of him. Black faces. “Whatcha doing perving on my little sister?”

  Eddie’s heart hammered with the old man’s warnings. The niggers were flesh eaters. Savages. They had tricked him with their pretty house, pretty girl. But he could smell their violence, the blood and mud from where they spawned. He struggled to break away and a voice growled, “Keep doing that and we’ll fuck you up more, white boy.”

  Eddie started crying. “Daddy, I’m sorry.”

  The blond skank jitterbugged in the spotlight.

  “Vampire,” Ed Keane, Sr. said, chasing her with the beam. “Turn to ash if she don’t suck pipe before sunup.”

  Eddie cringed at the palsied ghoul-whore. But he was excited too. “Shouldn’t you arrest her or something?”

  “What for? She’s no threat. Except to your dick.”

  Saturday morning ride-along. Eddie in the shotgun seat of his father’s shop, touring Mesa’s underworld. The only time he enjoyed being with his father. Before the day, and the drinking, got hot. They were in the avenues off Mesa Drive. A menagerie of stucco and cinder block fortified with iron bars and junked cars. Speed bumps that once protected kids at play now protected drug dealers from police raids.

  “Real people used to live here. Families. Back when I was a kid, before old Mesa High burned down and the mud people took over.” The old man hit the steering wheel. “Politicians have turned their back on the city. Call it good growth. It’s abandonment. Of course, they’ll deny it. Hold out their little Main Street shops as proof. Expect us to defend it.”

  Eddie loved watching the old man work the streets, holding dominion over the freaks and the loons. Bust them or blast them, help or hurt. Decided on an arbitrary scale that his father called justice. The old man patted his leg. “Can I tell you something?”

  “Okay.”

  “You remember when I shot that guy last year?”

  “The rapist. Yeah.”

  “What if I told you I shot him in cold blood?”

  “I thought he came after you. With his knife.”

  “He had a knife, all right. But he wasn’t holding it when I shot him.”

  “So you killed him for no reason. Why?”

  “Because I could. It gave me satisfaction.”

  Eleven-year-old Eddie did not see the fire in his father’s eyes, only the power of its glow. He swelled with pride at the knowledge he’d been entrusted to guard.

  “Are you still one of the good guys?”

  “I’m still wearing the badge, aren’t I?”

  “You think maybe when I grow up I can be a police?”

  Eddie sat ramrod straight, arms folded in his lap. His mother sat across from him at the table. They stared at each other over their untouched plates of food. Had been that way since his father sat down at the table, pulled out his handgun, and set it beside his utensils. “I’d appreciate a little quiet time tonight,” he said.

  A domestic-violence lullaby put Eddie to sleep. Woke fast when the book bag tied to his doorknob rustled. Early Daddy Defense System. In the light from the hall he saw his mother slip into the room. She knelt before his bed, face pitted from abuse. She kissed his forehead, sobbed, kissed his mouth. Her breath was copper-hot with blood and alcohol. Awkwardly, Eddie tried to embrace her.

  That first time couldn’t really be called sex. But as she pressed herself against him, Eddie saw relief spill into his mother’s features. Terror replaced by a strange and haunting nothingness. Eddie decided he would do anything to see that look of peace on his mother’s face. In the morning he wasn’t sure if he had dreamed the episode.

  “Eddie, get out of bed,” she called. “Oatmeal’s getting soggy.”

  The puppy’s neck had been twisted so severely that its dead eyes were staring back at its haunches. Its body lay on the patio next to a scattering of dead leaves. A stain on the carpet and the smear on his father’s polished shoe told the story.

  “I asked you to start picking up after your dog!” the old man yelled. “Now pick up your dog. Trash bag and shovel are waiting for you.”

  His dog’s name was Bandit. Eddie had carried him home on his bike from the store, made a house out of cardboard and towels, snuck him in at night, and let him chase his toes under the covers. He tried not to look at the creature, whose only crime had
been reliance on Eddie. Tears filled his eyes.

  “Don’t you dare cry, boyo,” his father said. “Dog’s a lesson. Everything gets taken away.”

  The house breathed pain. The wrongness of it stopped Eddie cold at the back door. Bandit must’ve sensed its threat too.

  The dog sniffed and nipped at Eddie’s shoes, growling defensively as he tried to get past.

  Eddie bent down and stroked Bandit’s fur, overcome by sadness at what was to become of his little friend. He thought of how the spade vibrated as he tamped down the dirt around the trash bag. He picked the dog up and pressed his face into its fur.

  It took a moment for the significance of the gesture to register.

  Eddie knew the horror show that awaited him inside. He was eight years old again, home from a half day of school with plans to dump his bag, snag a juice, and get gone.

  He remembered the frigid blast of air-conditioning that froze the sweat on his back and legs, the gurgle of the fridge, and how the light from the boxed windows formed a floating cage across the kitchen. He saw the empty whiskey bottle on the table and his father’s gun belt slung over one of the chairs. He passed quietly through the light bars, aware that a low keening had interrupted the preternatural stillness.

  It was coming from the end of the hall, his parents’ room, where Eddie found his father choking his mother blue. The old man was sitting astride her on the bed, still dressed in full uniform. Beneath him, his mother’s naked body writhed. She snorted for air, blowing snot and blood in an arc that reached almost to the ceiling. Her arms and legs pinwheeled and her bony ass bucked off the mattress.

  Eddie remembered standing there, transfixed, doing nothing.

  But in his memory he had not stopped to pick up the dog. Something had changed. For the first time since beginning his macabre descent into the wayback, Eddie had no compulsion to follow his past. He stepped out of it. Instead of walking through the kitchen, he went to the table and lifted his father’s gun from its holster.

  The automatic was heavy. He held it two-handed, the way his father had demonstrated: Got to hold firm on those jigs. Eddie carried it like that down the hall, Bandit at his heels the whole way.