Razorblade Tears

by S. A. Cosby

  “Fuck off of me!” Ike grunted. He felt himself being pushed backward. He was being herded toward the door like a rampaging bull. A third set of hands had joined the fray. It was Chris.

  Tex hollered at him to back off, but he might as well have been trying to soothe a swarm of hornets. Chris’s face was a storm of ferocity. Were he and Angelo friends? Was he defending the man’s honor? Or was he just righteously pissed? Ike had come into a place where Chris and his friends felt completely at ease and asked for their help. They had given him a glimpse into the man that Isiah had become. A good man that Ike had little hand in creating. How had he repaid their kindness? He’d jacked up a lonely drunk. Ike saw Buddy Lee running toward him out of the corner of his eye. Buddy Lee gave Chris a shove and got between him and Ike.

  “What the fuck, man?” Buddy Lee cried.

  Ike stopped fighting.

  “I’m going, okay?! I’m going. Buddy Lee, get my debit card, man,” Ike said. Tex released him. Another man, a brother in a matching white too-tight T-shirt, was holding Chris at bay as he tried to get to Buddy Lee. Tex grabbed Ike’s card from behind the bar and slapped it into his hands.

  “Get the hell out of here before I call the cops,” he said.

  “I thought you said you didn’t like cops,” Buddy Lee said.

  “Get the fuck out!” Tex said.

  “Come on, hoss, let’s go before Johnny Law gets here,” Buddy Lee said. He took a few steps backward before spinning on his heel and heading for the door. A few people booed as they walked by. Ike saw Jeff gazing at him from across the bar.

  “I’m sorry,” Ike mumbled. He knew his words wouldn’t be heard over the commotion in the bar, but he still wanted to say them.

  Jeff shook his head and looked away.

  After forty-five minutes of silence on the interstate, Buddy Lee pulled into Ike’s driveway and put the truck in park. The engine coughed and gasped as the truck idled. Ike reached for the door handle.

  “What was all that about? At the bar?” Buddy Lee asked. Ike opened the door. A warm breeze slipped past Ike into the truck. A few errant straw wrappers and empty chewing-gum sleeves stirred around Buddy Lee’s feet.

  “I told him don’t touch me. He touched me,” Ike said.

  “Okay,” Buddy Lee said. His voice had a light lilt at the end of the statement.

  “What is that supposed to mean?” Ike asked.

  “Nothing. Just I was watching you while I was talking to them ladies. Looked like he just touched your arm.”

  “What difference do it make? You tell somebody not to touch you, they ain’t supposed to touch you. If we was inside and he did that he’d end up staring up at the lights bleeding like a stuck pig,” Ike said. Buddy Lee flexed his fingers. Ike looked out the window. His shoulders slid down ever so slightly.

  But we ain’t inside, are we? Ike thought. The idea was his but he heard it in Isiah’s voice. Buddy Lee drummed his fingers on the steering wheel.

  “Did he ask you for your number?”

  “Leave it alone,” Ike said. Buddy Lee made a noise halfway between a laugh and a sigh.

  “Alright. Did you find out anything about Tangerine before you snatched up Samuel L. Jackson, Sr.?” Buddy Lee asked. Ike shifted in his seat so he could look Buddy Lee in the face.

  “Yeah. She might be hanging out with a music producer who calls himself Mr. Get Down,” Ike said. Buddy Lee laughed.

  “I know that ain’t on his driver’s license. Well, when we going to talk to Mr. Get Down?” Buddy Lee asked.

  “I’ll call you tomorrow. I need some sleep,” Ike said.

  “Okay. You sure you don’t want to talk about—”

  “I said I need some sleep,” Ike said. He climbed out of the truck and slammed the door.

  “Yeah, you need a hug and a nap, ya big baby,” Buddy Lee said in a barely audible voice. He backed out of the driveway, then turned left and headed out of the cul-de-sac. He did a rolling stop at the end of the road and turned right. Humming, he turned on the radio and an old classic by Waylon Jennings came warbling out of the truck’s speakers. Buddy Lee sang along as he passed an abandoned bait-and-tackle shop on Route 634. He didn’t pay any attention to the old Chevrolet Caprice in the desiccated parking lot. Seconds later two heads popped up in the front seat.

  “You think he saw us?” Cheddar asked.

  “Nah. Too dark. Let me call Grayson,” Dome said. He pulled out his cell.

  “Yeah,” Grayson answered.

  “The white guy just dropped the Black guy off. What you want us to do now?” Dome asked.

  “Stay there. See where he goes in the morning,” Grayson said.

  “You want us to stay here all night? It’s like a little bit after eleven,” Dome said.

  “Did I fucking stutter? We need to find this girl. Like yesterday, and he gonna lead us right to her,” Grayson said. Dome didn’t respond.

  “What? You got a problem with that?” Grayson said.

  “Nah, but what about Andy?”

  “That’s all gonna get handled when we find this cunt,” Grayson said. “And Dome.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Don’t let him get by you or y’all gonna have to be dealt with, too,” Grayson said.

  He hung up the phone.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Ike knew he was dreaming.

  It was a dream that danced at the corners of his remembrance. Isiah is standing next to him in the backyard as Ike mans the grill. It’s the cookout after Isiah’s graduation from college. Folks from both sides of Mya and Ike’s family are there. Friends from Mya’s job. A few friends Ike has made since he got out of prison. Mostly other landscapers. A few suppliers. A couple of guys from the Y. No one from his old crew, the North River Boys are in attendance. Isiah is trying to talk to Ike, but Ike isn’t listening because he knows what Isiah is trying to say and he doesn’t want to hear. He never wants to hear it.

  Derek is there in the dream, which is a memory in technicolor. They are holding hands. Isiah is saying that Derek isn’t just his friend. He tells Ike that Derek is important to him. Ike is concentrating on the burgers and hot dogs. He focuses on the red glow of the coals. The unhurried dripping of the grease from the burgers as it falls and sizzles on the charcoal. Anything to keep his mind off what his only son is saying. When he says it, Ike watches as he responds the only way he knows how to respond. No, that’s not really true. He responds in the way that’s easiest for him. He flips the grill. Coals fly everywhere like fiery confetti. A piece lands on Isiah’s arm. It will leave a light scar that resembles a birthmark. The scene fades to black.

  Then he hears a cavalcade of screams and turns to see Isiah’s and Derek’s heads explode in a shower of blood and bone.

  Ike opened his eyes.

  Narrow beams of light from the rising sun sliced through the slats on the blinds in the bedroom window. Ike sat up and touched his face with both hands. His cheeks were wet. Mya’s side of the bed was empty. She must have gotten up during the night and gone to lie with Arianna. She did that from time to time now. From time to time Ike had to fight the urge to be jealous of a three-year-old. Ike swung his legs up and out of bed until his feet hit the carpet. He grabbed his phone off the nightstand and checked the time. It was ten minutes after seven. He had fallen asleep almost immediately after Buddy Lee had dropped him off around eleven. After the bar. After jacking that guy up against the wall. Isiah would have had a lot to say about that situation.

  “You’re just projecting your fears about your own masculinity, Dad. It’s called overcompensating.” He could almost hear Isiah saying it with his telltale razor-sharp sarcasm.

  Ike stood. He didn’t want to admit it, but Isiah would have been right. When that guy touched him, all he could see were the faces of …

  “Stop it,” Ike said out loud. His voice sounded hollow in the early morning stillness that filled the house. Ike grabbed his T-shirt off the floor and pulled it over his head. He was still wearing his jean
s. He slipped down the stairs and into the kitchen. He turned on the coffee maker. While it began to rattle and hum he thought about what Nice Guy Jeff had told him last night. Mr. Get Down. Tariq. He and Buddy Lee could just go and find a house with the flying buttresses and try to bluff their way inside but Ike didn’t think that was going to work. Problem was, he couldn’t think of anything else that would work, either.

  The coffee maker was taking its own sweet time, so Ike decided to grab the paper. The sun peeked from behind the clouds as Ike searched for it. The retired grandmother who was their paper carrier had terrible aim. Ike rooted around in the boxwood shrubs near his front door until he found the Saturday edition. When he straightened he saw Mya’s car coming down the road.

  A banana-yellow Caprice was following her. She turned in to their short driveway and parked. The Caprice kept on going down the road. Mya climbed out of the car holding a big bag from Hardee’s. Her mouth was set in a grim line that aged her by ten years. She hurried toward the house, toward him.

  “I went to get us some breakfast. I think … I think that car followed me to the Hardee’s, then followed me back here. Ike, I think they followed me,” she said. Her voice had a breathlessness that made his skin break out in gooseflesh.

  “Go inside. Lock the door. Go upstairs with Arianna. Don’t come down until I come get you.”

  “Ike, what’s going on?”

  “Go upstairs, boo,” Ike said. Mya clutched the bag to her chest and hurried into the house. Ike went around to the back of the house. He went into his shed. Pushing past the heavy bag, he grabbed something from a hook and headed back to the front of the house.

  The cul-de-sac they lived in was more like a side road. It didn’t end in a circle. The gravel-covered road just stopped half a mile past his house. In addition to Ike and Mya’s story-and-a-half house, Townbridge Lane had five more homes of various sizes. When he and Mya had first moved here it was considered the poor side of the county. Then some bright-eyed developer had placed cheap modular homes around them, spread some gravel on their dirt road, and rechristened it Townbridge Lane. Neighbors came and went with alarming frequency. They brought various levels of care for their front yards with them. Manicured lawns sat a few feet from front yards full of children’s toys and car parts.

  Ike crouched down, hiding among his shrubs. That Caprice was on its way to a dead end. They’d have to stop, turn around, and come back. Ike gripped the handle of a bush axe with both hands. The bush axe was an old, time-honored farm tool. In the days before string trimmers and brush-cutting blade attachments, the bush axe was used to clear weeds and brush from difficult-to-access areas, like a ditch bank or a rolling sloping hillside. The tool consisted of a long flat wooden handle and wide curved blade that came to a wicked point. It looked somewhat like a comma. Except a comma wasn’t double edged and made out of steel.

  It was entirely possible that whoever had followed Mya to and from the Hardee’s was a lost traveler with a busted GPS on his or her phone. The kind that told you that you had arrived when you pulled into a cornfield. It was possible. It was also possible that the Caprice was connected to what had happened at the shop yesterday.

  “This how y’all wanna do it, right?” Ike said in a low murmur.

  He heard the Caprice before he saw it. When he did see it he recognized the driver. He was one of the guys who had accompanied the blond Viking he had nearly decapitated. The car was going slow enough to be sightseeing. Ike exploded from behind the shrubs like he’d been fired from a rifle. He was already swinging the bush axe as he ran. It sliced through the air in a wicked arc before slamming into the driver’s side window and shattering it like a sheet of ice during a spring thaw.

  “Fuck, shit!” Dome yelled. His foot slipped off the gas pedal as he tried to fold his body under the steering wheel. Cheddar reached for the .32 in his waistband, but it got hung up on the buckle on his belt. The car continued to roll even as Ike reared back with the bush axe again.

  “Drive!” Cheddar roared.

  “What the fuck you think I’m trying to do?” Dome howled.

  Ike swung the axe again. It connected with the back window of the Caprice. There must have been an imperfection in the tempered glass, because it exploded inward, showering Dome and Cheddar with razor-sharp shards. Cheddar got his gun loose, but just as he did, Dome hit the gas. Cheddar was thrown backward and the gun went off. Dome and Cheddar both screamed as the cacophonous sound of the gun filled the car. Dome felt a bullet whiz by his head and exit through the roof. He flew down the road spitting gravel from his rear tires. Bits of glass covered him like chips of ice.

  Ike watched as the Caprice reached the end of Townbridge Lane doing forty and turned right onto Townbridge Road without even attempting to slow down.

  Randy Hiers, Ike’s neighbor two houses down, came out onto his front step. He was wearing a wifebeater and lounge pants. Randy didn’t work. He was collecting disability for a work-related injury that Ike was 90 percent sure he was faking. Randy liked to decorate his yard with Confederate flags and DON’T TREAD ON ME signs. He railed against freeloading immigrants every chance he got. Ike didn’t think he recognized the irony of crusading against freeloaders while collecting disability that he didn’t really need.

  “What the hell is going on out here?” Randy yelled. He had the self-assurance of most mediocre men. They told themselves the world was their oyster but never realized their oyster had turned rancid a long time ago.

  “Nothing you need to worry about, Randy,” Ike said. He started to walk back toward his house.

  “Now hold on a goddamned minute. You out here breaking some guy’s windows with that … what is that, anyway?” he said, glancing at the bush axe. Randy shook his head like a bull and continued his righteous diatribe. “I got kids in here, Ike!” Randy said.

  “You wanna see them grow up, you’ll go back in your fucking house,” Ike said. He didn’t wait for Randy to respond. By the time he reached his front door Mya was already there waiting for him. Ike walked inside and closed and locked the door behind him.

  “Ike, what the hell is going on?” Mya asked. Her face was drawn. Ike leaned the bush axe against the coatrack near the front door.

  “You think you can take Arianna and stay with your sister for a few days?” Ike asked. Mya moved closer to him. Her hand hovered over his chest but didn’t land.

  “Ike, what is going on?” she asked again. Her tone was gentle but firm. Ike went in the kitchen and poured himself a cup of coffee. He came back in the living room. Took a long sip.

  “You know how I told you me and Buddy Lee was handling what happened to Isiah?” Ike said.

  “Yes,” Mya said.

  “This is what handling it looks like. Call your sister and see if you can stay over there for a few. Please,” Ike said before taking another sip of his coffee.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Buddy Lee turned in to the trailer court and nearly had a heart attack. Parked in his short driveway was a gold Lexus. Standing next to the Lexus was his ex-wife. Buddy Lee parked his truck on the side of the gravel road that ran in a serpentine “S” through the trailer court.

  Why in the hell is she here? Buddy Lee thought. Tremors started in his hands and worked their way up his arms. Flexing and unflexing his fingers helped slightly. He checked the rearview mirror. She was still standing by the Lexus. The breeze caught her hair and made a halo out of it around her head. Buddy Lee sucked at his teeth and got out of his truck.

  Christine took a few steps toward him. Buddy Lee leaned against his tailgate. They stood there like old gunslingers. Words were usually their weapons, and their aim was deadly. The breeze died down, and Christine’s hair fell back to her shoulders.

  “I guess you’re wondering why I’m here,” she said. Buddy Lee flicked his tongue against the inside of his bottom lip.

  “The thought had crossed my mind. I figured the next time I’d see you would be on Judgment Day,” he said. Christine tried to smile b
ut it fell far short of her eyes.

  “Thought you didn’t believe in God.”

  “I don’t really. But who knows? Maybe I’ll start going to church and hedge my bets,” Buddy Lee said. Christine sniffed. The security lights in the park blinked on, and Buddy Lee saw the wet shine around Christine’s eyes.

  “So, what’s up?” Buddy Lee said.

  “Can we go inside?”

  “I don’t know. It’s not the Town and Country style you’re used to,” Buddy Lee said.

  “It’s bigger than the first trailer we had,” Christine said. That reference to their shared past knocked the breath out of him. After all these years he thought she’d probably had those memories scrubbed out of her mind. Made herself believe their years together were a bad dream. They certainly felt like a dream to Buddy Lee. Hazy, half-remembered visions of a person and a time he occasionally didn’t believe he’d ever been or had ever existed.

  “Okay, come on,” Buddy Lee said. Christine followed him inside. He was sitting down on the couch when he realized he’d left his six-pack in the truck. Christine sat in the recliner.

  “You want a beer? I can run back to the truck and get my six-pack,” Buddy Lee said.

  “No, thank you. I was thinking about what you said. I know it appears I didn’t care about Derek, but I did. There were nights I stayed up all night praying for him to change. Praying to God to make me a better mother. If I was a better mother, he wouldn’t have been like he was. I failed him. I failed him in so many ways,” Christine said. Tears were running down her face.

  “Hey, hey. You couldn’t change Derek. Nobody could. You won’t by yourself in that. When I was around I tried, too, but I’m of the mind nowadays he didn’t need to change. I mean, if he was still here, would it really matter to you who he was laying down with at night? Because it wouldn’t matter one goddamn bit to me,” Buddy Lee said. He felt his throat tighten.