by Lee Thompson
IT’S ONLY DEATH
Lee Thompson
First Edition
It’s Only Death © 2014 by Lee Thompson
All Rights Reserved.
A DarkFuse Release
www.darkfuse.com
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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OTHER BOOKS BY AUTHOR
A Beautiful Madness
The Dampness of Mourning
Within This Garden Weeping
Check out the author’s official page at DarkFuse for a complete list:
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For Shane Ryan Staley. Your vision is inspiring. I’ll always admire your courage to publish that which some deem too dark. We know the dark is the dark, and we all walk in it...
Acknowledgements
My work is masturbation without those who read it and those who make it publishable. So a massive thanks to my fans, my pre-readers (Shaun Ryan, Chris McCaffrey, and Charlene Cocrane), and the entire DarkFuse team. Thanks for everything!
I have walked so far into this river of blood that even if I stopped now, it would be as hard to go back to being good as it is to keep killing people.
—Macbeth, Act 3, Scene 4
1
July 4th
They clubbed me and tossed me into the trunk of a new pink Cadillac shortly after midnight. I knew the car and couldn’t figure out at first why it had to be her car. But the last three days, since I blew back into Miami, had been building up to this. I’d had old enemies who were just waiting for my mother to die so they could kill me, and I had made new enemies while trying to forge a bond with my sister that I had irrevocably broken when I killed our father ten years ago.
I should have seen the abduction, and what would follow it coming, but somewhere during those last three days, since returning home, I’d finally started to feel human. And like I always reasoned, feeling human—wanting to love and be loved, wanting to forgive and be forgiven, wanting to believe in destiny and yet grappling with the intangible—can be the biggest distraction of all.
The back of my head was bleeding, but not so badly that I couldn’t focus, just bad enough to make me angry. The violent wires that fired in my brain started arcing the second a dark figure in a hoodie slammed the trunk shut. I hadn’t been able to see his face. I heard two muffled voices, one of them laughing, the other urging the first to shut the hell up. They didn’t sound familiar, but I hadn’t expected them to. Grunts like these guys were always unremarkable, although in their own minds they were criminal masterminds.
Then I heard a woman with them laugh and it felt like somebody had lit me on fire.
The trunk grew hotter. I tried to distract myself by obsessing about the corpse in there with me; I could feel his nose against my forehead, that flesh cold and unforgiving, no breath issuing from the poor sap’s nostrils. I worried that it was the only friend I had left in the world. I worried that Fat Lou had cut Robert into ribbons after what we did to those bikers, for ourselves, and for my sister Harley.
The grunts should have shot me before they threw me in the trunk, it would have made more sense. The girl shouldn’t have laughed, not when she knew what was happening, and she shouldn’t have treated my life or the life of the dead man riding in the dark with me as some form of entertainment.
To quell my anger, to channel it for when I would need it, I focused on the sound of tires on gravel, the shift of the vehicle as we turned out onto the road, heading for the highway, and I assumed, the Everglades. Three miles, maybe four to the water and the gators, surely not enough time for me to gag to death on the fumes leaking in from the exhaust.
There was a rust hole above the wheel well the size of a quarter.
Light from passing cars cut through it occasionally.
The disturbed air smelled of blood and sweat and my own anger and fear.
I wondered if my abductors knew what kind of trouble they’d gotten themselves into.
Some people are born victims, other people love to play the role to get what they can out of those who weep for the needy and helpless. Others are victims of their own carnal and selfish nature, but I’m not any of them. I could hear the radio playing, something hip-hop, Eminem maybe. My blood was drying quickly, matting my hair in a clump against my scalp. I whispered into the darkness, “Hell, I probably had this coming.”
2
July 2nd
Two days before I’d spent a half hour at my little sister’s trailer between Miami and Kendall. The last time I’d seen Harley she was eleven years old. When she was a child, she had a lot of friends, other girls who always spent the nights on the weekends for slumber parties. She had stars in her eyes then, and she believed the world was a beautiful place made just for her, and she felt loved, you could always see that; both of our parents—Elmore James Jackson Sr., and Betty Ford Jackson—doting over her because they’d really only wanted a daughter. Harley was twenty-one now and the stars she had in her eyes pre-puberty had long been extinguished. She had not felt the love and comforts of a father, or mother, or older brother, throughout all those pivotal moments in her teens because I had robbed her of that.
Now she was a stripper with a lot of problems, but there was inside her a part that hadn’t died, or she had refused to release. She wasn’t worried about herself so much, or the difficulties life often threw her way, or any troubles that were a direct result of her own choices. Her worry was all bound up in our mother dying. They had been exceptionally close although Harley had always been a Daddy’s girl.
Seeing her grown up shocked me. There was a part of me that had believed I had broken time somehow when I shot my father in that bank I robbed, when he had come in with his pistol drawn and screaming orders for me to drop the weapon—his shotgun. And his eyes had changed so quickly when he realized who he was pointing his pistol at, who it was that he would have to arrest, process, and attend the trial of. I was his boy and his few seconds of hesitation had cost him his life, the thing he had drilled into my head—to never take chances—was what I used to blame for his murder when I thought about it at all.
I looked at Harley, the grown Harley, and figured she must be an illusion. I looked at where she lived, how she lived, and was a bastard for thinking that I had caused her to run away with me, although her fleeing had never covered any physical distance.
Her trailer was a mess and it smelled like sex. It was in a mobile home community that should have been leveled twenty years ago. From the driveway I’d seen the Four Seasons and Southeast Financial Center skyscrapers standing like eternal sentinels guarding the beach. This place was different than the heart of downtown. People in this neighborhood on the west side, close to the Everglades, were blue collar for the most part, and more people spoke Spanish than English. A few blocks east the traffic was terrible, but the poor people were mostly left alone.
I looked around my sister’s trailer. The closed, bloodred drapes were so thick that you couldn’t tell if it was day or night. She sat on a nice leather couch, and stared blankly at a sixty-inch televisi
on. She had a pile of purses taking up most of an open closet in the living room, a couple dozen pairs of high heels and assorted, highly polished black boots near the door. She wore a pink halter top with no bra and short shorts. Both of her eyes had recently been blackened.
I said, “Who messed up your face?”
She shrugged. “I fell.”
“Right,” I said. I looked at my hands. They’d never hit a woman, but I felt like striking her for protecting some dirt bag, probably one who lived in one of the other beaten-up heaps in that crappy little mobile home park on Miami’s outskirts. If she told me who did it and where he was, I’d make sure he never hurt her again.
I said, “Does he work at the joint?”
“He doesn’t work there.”
“Just another love-struck patron?” I said.
She said, “We’re all grown up now, James.”
“What are you saying? That you can take care of yourself?”
She leaned back against the sofa and crossed her legs and stared at me as if I were stupid. She said, “I’ve been taking care of myself and Mom for the past ten years, Elmore.”
“I should still be James to you,” I said. “Why don’t you go put some clothes on?”
“No, you’re Elmore to me. And I won’t put clothes on because I don’t want to and this is my goddamn house.”
“Are you still mad at me?”
“What? For shooting our dad? Do you realize that you look just like him?”
“I mean mad at me for anything,” I said.
“No,” she lied, her eyes dulling. I wondered if she was popping pills, if she had started as a child, after I ran away to leave her with a mother who found Christ in her time of need, and had tried to cram doctrine down Harley’s throat to keep her from suffering the same fate as our father. She looked at me slowly, almost as if she wasn’t sure I was there. She said, “I don’t care that you’re back. But Mom does. She needs to see you before she dies. So, see her, then go back to whatever you were doing. Nobody really missed you, you know?”
“Sure,” I said, watching tears form in her eyes. I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to tell her I was sorry, or if I was supposed to say something else that I didn’t mean. I said, “You like working that kind of job?”
“Don’t say anything to Mom,” she said.
“Why? She’s endured worse news, hasn’t she?”
“Don’t be a prick,” Harley said. “She thinks I sell Mary Kay. I want her to think that for as long as she’s alive, all right?” There was no weakness, no bending, in her gaze. She had the same look all of our family had when we were serious. I wondered how many times she had to use that look on the lowlifes who hung out at the bar, their hands always pawing on a fake tan, glittered skin, their eyes as hungry as those of wolves, some of them born to run in packs. But Harley was a survivor more than anything, and it wasn’t hard to figure out she would go for the alpha male in any group and count on him keeping the others in line so she could go on living whatever life she envisioned. I said, “Do you have a boyfriend?”
She leaned forward and plucked nail polish from the coffee table. The smell of it was nearly overpowering when she opened it. She said, “I’ve had a lot of boyfriends. I doubt Dad would have approved of any of them.”
“What about me?”
“You ever wonder what went through his head when he realized it was you robbing that bank?”
“I try not to think about it,” I said.
“Well, you should. I’ve thought a lot about it. And I’m sure that he saw your red Nike’s and he was confused for a second, because he probably thought you were in danger until he saw that you were the one holding the gun… You’re still wearing those same shoes, aren’t you?” she said, leaning forward to look at my feet.
I was wearing the same shoes I’d worn then. I said, “Does this help you?”
“Who cares about me?” she said. “I’m talking about you, and about him. He probably saw you there and he froze for a second, you know? Because you had always been such a good kid, great grades, a scholarship, a bright future ahead of you with Don’s daughter…and then you shot him…”
She shook her head, laughed quietly, a sickening laugh. She looked at me with disgust and said, “You don’t even seem to feel bad about it.”
“I didn’t have time to feel bad when it happened.”
“What about now?”
“I dealt with it afterwards.”
“How?” she asked. “How do you deal with something like that?”
“Is Mom at home right now?”
She finished painting the fingernails on her left hand, blew on them, and then set the polish back on the table. Her raccoon eyes weren’t all bruises, I realized. I said, “Do you have a hard time sleeping?”
“You could say that.”
“Do you want to run over there with me?”
“I have to go to work soon,” she said, looking at the clock on the wall. It was almost seven p.m. “Tell our mother I said hello, will you?”
I stood and offered my hand to help her up. She scowled at me and pushed herself up, wrapped her arms around herself and disappeared down the hall. I heard a door shut and heard her turn on the shower. I walked to the entryway. I locked the door behind me, descended the wooden porch, saw two kids, maybe thirteen years old, both of them dark-skinned and their elbows propped out as they straddled their immobile bicycles. They didn’t blink. I looked away. I had to visit my mom and get out of town before the police, or old enemies knew I was around and took it upon themselves to make an already bad day even worse. People on either side of the law would have been happy to see me bleeding in a shallow grave out in the Everglades.
* * *
I wasn’t ready to face my mother. After I’d fled and spent eight years in the Keys, and the last two years digging ditches for under-the-table pay across the United States, I rarely let myself think what it’d be like when I returned home. It was easy to imagine that my own mother would slap me, and then hug me, and then call the police, and stand there teary-eyed in the front lawn as they put me in the back of a cruiser.
Or she might just cook me the first meal I’d eaten at home in those ten years, and my vision would grow fuzzy, and she’d be sitting there at the head of the table where my father used to sit, and she’d be teary-eyed, and smiling, and she’d tell me that she poisoned me.
Or she might not let me in the house at all and tell me that I had died with her husband, and slam the door in my face. There were too many possibilities, and none of them without some type of pain, so it was best to avoid thinking about them.
I was driving a new Impala that Harley had rented for me in her name. I hadn’t driven a car in the last ten years. It made me feel nearly normal. It was something that I also realized I didn’t miss all that much. I preferred hitching a ride, no car insurance, no way for anybody to track me. But I also knew I was a fool for coming home. I had plenty of enemies already, and there was one more in the making with my bruised sister pretending she could handle what men had dished out.
After stopping at a convenience store geared toward tourists, and buying my mother a gift, I borrowed the store’s phone book. I asked the young kid behind the counter for directions to the three closest strip clubs. He was giddy, bashful, acned, and helpful. He wrote the directions on a slip of paper and slid it across the counter. He asked if I was new to town, if I was going into the city. I thanked him without answering and went back to the Impala, the air muggy and my clothing sticking to me. I had no idea where I was going to stay. I imagined there were plenty of low-risk motels, shambling things in need of a new roof, new plumbing, as many cockroaches as water or cum stains.
Truth was I wanted to stay at my mom’s house, to pretend, at least for the next few days, that I was a boy again and everything was right with the world and that I had not introduced a darkness to it that could not be driven back with any form of light, no matter how intense.
Life outside the h
aven I’d destroyed had shown me that most of us are one step away from insanity. The compulsions we surrender to, the thoughts we secretly obsess about, the egocentric nature of man, it was all bound to blow up in our pretty little faces. But, who cared, really? I didn’t. I thought we all kind of got what we deserved. Maybe it made me an asshole. No, I was an asshole. Maybe it made me insensitive to the plight of my fellow human beings.
What I really needed was a gun. All I had was an old six-inch Buck knife that I won in Montana a year ago during a game of poker. I had spent hours constructing sheaths inside all of my pants. Life in the Keys had offered little trouble, it was mostly sunshine and women and booze and boredom. But I was spoiling myself there and just waiting to die. So, when I got back to the mainland and put my hands to work, hardened the muscles that had gone soft with disuse, I came across many who looked upon a stranger in town, or on their new job, as something threatening and alien. There were a lot of fights that didn’t have to be. There was bloodshed that I might have taken a little more satisfaction in than was normal.
I hit the strip clubs. The first two were gaudy as the third, Electric Lady Land. “Voodoo Chile” was playing on the stereo when I went inside. A bouncer a little younger than me, maybe twenty-five, took my money at the door and had at first looked at me with a cursory glance, and then paused, his hand coming to rest on my shoulder. He said in a nasally voice that seemed at odds with his bulk, “I know you?”
