THUGLIT Issue Six

by Kieran Shea

  “I hope your ass gets raped hard in prison,” Louie said. “My friend. My buddy.”

  “Arrest us,” I said.

  Pete pulled out a Glock from under his shirt and held it on us. I should have searched him. I wasn’t good at this hardened criminal shit. He grinned like a pig in shit. I waited for sirens to keen and for cops to spring on us. Only the wind blew. Pete laughed, showing his yellow teeth.

  “Dominic didn’t think you had the guts,” he said. “‘A couple of pussies,’ he said.”

  “But you’re a cop,” I said.

  “I am, but I've also been on Dominic's payroll for years. And I perform a special function. I check out his people, see if they are reliable. Do what they’re told.”

  It hit me. He’d set this all up. “But I could have shot your ass.”

  Pete laughed, flapping his lips. “Blanks. You wouldn’t have shot shit, but you would have proven your loyalty. Shown to us that you could do what was necessary.”

  “You mean sell my soul, give it all to my lord and master?”

  “Better than your ass,” Pete said. “You first.” He pointed his gun at Louie. “I owe you this.”

  I moved fast, pulled out my Luger and fired. The bolt lifted and set. The bullet hit his sternum, shattering his ribs. The shock stunned him, and I fired again. Louie dove, sliding off the dock and into the river. Pete managed to get off one shot as he fell, and the bullet hit a plastic mermaid right between her tits on the restaurant wall. He lay down, and I watched as the river wind whipped the animation from his eyes. I sat down next to him. Louie found a ladder on the other side and climbed up. He shivered, soaked.

  “It flipped a switch,” I said.

  “Calm your ass down,” Louie said, making sure he still had his bearings. “He was a bad dude. Okay? You’re fine. That illusion you call a soul is pure. So stop whining.”

  We threw the .45 in the river and told Dominic the gun had jammed, and we had to react. He never informed us that it had all been a setup to test our loyalty. He admired our cool, our reflexes.

  Accidents happen.

  We’d proven to him he could depend on us, and he believed he’d collected on our souls, my soul.

  Sweet Caroline

  by Jessica Adams

  Standing in the grocery store in Cabo San Lucas, she was four months pregnant and the aisles were stocked with tantalizing, shiny packages. Things that looked familiar. But they weren’t, quite—the words were foreign, the condensed milk was flavored with chile peppers.

  They’d sailed down the length of Baja California with exquisite slowness. There had been moments of extreme beauty, she guessed you’d say, though that wasn’t really the right word for something so separate from civilization. The whales breeched in the distance, their black bodies just visible, sprays of salt water from their heads coming at three-minute intervals. Once one had breeched alongside the boat. A huge black slippery thing, smelling of the sea. Fecund, it was. Raw life. Primordial. The basics.

  That was all there was off the coast, with the whole of the Pacific stretching infinitely away, westward. Of course everyone knew there was a limit to it. Land out there.

  Somewhere.

  But how many chances to make it that far? The wind picked up in hard gusts. If you slipped in, if you were floating out there, what chance would you have?

  The three of them had met in a weekend sailing class over in the East Bay, their enthusiasm coming in a surprising burst. Alcatraz emerging from the mist, Coit Tower in a shaft of sunlight. It was exhilarating. When they’d lost their jobs within two weeks of each other, it had seemed like fate. The thing she’d spent months dreading, when it happened, she'd felt despair for a couple of days. But when that passed, she felt great. Really great. The worst part: it was she who had closed herself up in that beige-walled cubicle, the screensaver on her computer a photo of a Tahitian resort. Supposedly the dream she was working toward, but actually it had just been mocking her. She’d been selling her youth to a faceless corporation.

  Now all those things—decisions—seemed antiquated, silly. Danger had been somehow irrelevant.

  That was how she’d ended up in the Walgreen’s in San Diego, buying a pregnancy test. The boat, a plastic tub with low ceilings and a pale wood veneer, was anchored in a sort of lagoon beside an old amusement park. She was almost too ashamed (her body had betrayed her in a way that would soon be obvious) to walk up to the cashier, doing it only because her anxiety was greater. She stopped in a public bathroom on the way back to the Ferris wheel, the thick concrete walls of the stalls practically soundproof. She didn’t know why knowing hadn’t made her feel less anxious. But there was something else, too. A secret, unexpected pleasure.

  James was back in San Francisco, obliviously going on with his life. Their breakup wasn’t (if she thought about it like this, from a distance) anybody’s fault. It was just that they’d tied a knot they couldn’t untie, not in a hundred years. The things they had would have to be wrapped up and put away.

  Except this.

  She knew what he’d say. He would be dispassionate, uncompromising. It didn’t make sense. Of course it didn’t. But she didn’t feel like making sense.

  *****

  In Ensenada, their boat—the Osprey—hooked up with two other boats heading south. People on boats did that. Hooked up, looked out for each other. She and her friends became known, collectively, as Osprey. Sometimes she realized that people didn’t know her actual name. Just as she wasn’t sure of theirs.

  The others were moving slowly through the aisles, pushing carts piled high with cheap provisions. Someone would stop and puzzle over a label, turning a jar in their hands wonderingly, deciding. It was details like these that jumped out at you after a month at sea, in uninhabited bays, tossing in the swell, hunched over a campfire on the beach, somebody burning plastic refuse. She thought about those molecules, invisible now, weightless, floating out across the ocean. About how, in the end, there wasn’t any way to escape from the things that people made. Nowhere to escape to, not anymore.

  *****

  The streets of Cabo were jammed with tourist hybrids, bilingual signs advertising ice cream and souvenirs, men hawking timeshares with the kind of relentlessness you find in young children.

  It was only a matter of time before one of the guys in their little group figured out that the timeshare industry offered hidden treasures. It would have been easy to blow off those men standing along the sidewalks with their polo shirts—clichéd predators of tourists. And they did, at first. Then one of them (probably the one who wouldn’t stop talking) paused, opened his mouth.

  The conversation started with the offer of free Mexican blankets if the group would visit the new complex they were building farther up the beach. A Mexican blanket. That sounded tempting. Probably because they had all been cold for months. Not just cold, but poor, scavenging. And now, strangers who didn’t speak the language, who knew no one save a few casual acquaintances from the dinghy dock and the closest taco stand.

  Somebody played it cool. What about a Mexican blanket plus dinner? A Mexican blanket, dinner, and a shower? It was a little game, the Mexican guy was playing it, they were playing it, having nothing else to do then but stand there in the street.

  The one thing they really needed was money. It was only a matter of time before one of them figured out that the timeshare companies had pretty deep pockets, and were apparently willing to do whatever it took to get people through there—numbers. These guys standing on the street (none of them were sure how it all worked, exactly) could deliver hundreds in cold, hard cash in exchange for five or six hours listening to a sales pitch. Everybody was working an angle.

  It wasn’t an easy way to make money. It would have been a mistake to go into it thinking that way. You needed stamina.

  She thought about the big buffet of free food.

  The saleswoman watched them eat eggs with tortillas and started the warm-up. It was hard to believe anyone could take th
em seriously as people who’d pay thousands for a room they’d use maybe once a year. But that was the power of their gringo faces. Even their casual clothes, the plastic shoes all the tourists were wearing, their sunburned skin and those flat, ugly accents—she didn’t want to trade on all that, but she found herself doing it anyway. Because she was hungry. Because she was just about broke.

  The woman at the head of the breakfast table had stopped talking. Everyone was pushing back in their chairs.

  The people she’d come with, they’d started to realize how little they knew each other. It would have been better if they hadn’t known each other at all. Everything they thought they’d known was being torn down, dismantled, by the sheer amount of time they spent together. By the insistent proximity. By the fact that, now, they were the only people any of them could relate to.

  The line was filing out the door.

  She followed, with a glance back toward the buffet.

  The saleswoman was chatting cheerfully, oblivious to the fact that her voice was being drowned by the wind. Then the faux haciendas fell away and there was the water. The wind was loud, nothing else was audible. She saw the woman climbing a set of stairs, probably choosing them over the elevator because of the view. The rest of the group followed behind obediently.

  They never let you go the first time you said no. They brought in more people to a special room, carpeted, overlooking the water. Someone else in the room always said yes, and a champagne cork would pop. The other salespeople looking over and adding to the cheers. Cheap champagne frothing out into plastic glasses.

  Suddenly she didn’t want to go along with it. It was the same urge she’d had in grade school, just to do something else for awhile. One of the others looked back, checking on her. They’d probably guessed about the baby. She’d have to confide in them soon. Or maybe she’d tell them she’d decided to stay here. Go into sales.

  She waved back—a few fingers, like one of the popular girls in high school—and smiled, a real smile. Nothing was wrong. Really, think about it. Everything was OK, manageable. Not ideal. But OK. She followed the group up the stairs. The saleswoman was pushing open one of the doors. A model unit—shiny stainless appliances, dried flowers in a vase under a mirror. Something to aspire to, but still within reach.

  The urge to check out was getting stronger. Soon there’d be a child clinging to her body, sucking. It would be in her mind, too. Sucking with all its might.

  She went out the door and stood looking over the railing along the gallery. It looked out over a parking lot, a stretch of scrubby land divided up by chain link fences. Off into the distance, desert, the cacti low to the ground, stunted by the winds that had come roaring with the strength of fission off the Pacific. The gallery stretched away, the kind of open place that as a kid you wanted to run through, full of speed, practically weightless.

  She glanced behind her to see if anyone was looking. One of the men was examining the furnishings. The saleswoman came up to him and he asked a question, apparently genuine. She loved him for that generosity. She tried to relax her face and then stepped sideways, out of his field of vision. Walked off, fast, started running, down that empty stretch of concrete, toward infinity.

  *****

  The end came quickly. It wasn’t at all like being a kid. Distances, manmade ones at least, had gotten so much shorter. The gallery ended with another railing, a set of stairs in case of fire, a thick slope of sand out there at low tide. Instead of turning back, she gripped the banister and found herself going up to the next floor. An identical gallery stretched back the other way.

  She waited a few beats.

  Her heart was thudding in her chest on the off chance one the others would come up the far stairs.

  The door to one of the units was slightly ajar. She paused, wondering, was somebody actually staying here? Somebody who had made the mistake of buying one of these places. A phone started ringing. That old Neil Diamond song with her name in it. The ringing went on and on, and then stopped.

  You’d think people would be able to explain the things they did with reasons, even logic. She’d found that she often didn’t have reasons. Or if she did, she didn’t necessarily want to admit to them. She pushed open the door and looked in.

  She didn’t see it right away.

  But after a few seconds (how long had it really been? Much longer?), she realized that this was not a place to linger. This was a place to get out of, fast, not look back, and never speak of. Something else had taken over—hat persistent division between her body and what she, separate from it, knew, that kept getting her into trouble. Her mind was clear, completely—the way it was when she woke up spontaneously at four in the morning.

  The bed was as neatly made as if no one had ever slept in it. Maybe no one had. The man was lying with his arms outstretched. He was wearing his shoes on the bed. That bothered her a little. They were worn at the outside edge, but looked as if he’d let the shoeshine boys in the streets do their thing.

  His face was a carnival mask. There was an actual mask covering his features. She wanted to touch it. She had a fleeting thought that maybe she should have been a doctor. A surgeon. It was probably too late now, but maybe not. The body fascinated her. She looked around for something to use to lift the mask. She found an old paper napkin still in her pocket from the time they’d eaten burgers on the beach.

  The face under the mask was almost ordinary. The only thing odd about it was a dark birthmark on the nose. The nose was bulbous under that dark stain, and it was covered with short, wiry hairs, like pig bristles. She let the mask down gently, knowing the guy couldn’t feel it but knowing, too, somehow, that this was the way you should touch a body.

  Sharing time.

  She hadn’t thought enough about that before. Did people have their own, unique time, that they could choose to share?

  She needed to get out of there, now, before she got in deeper than she already was. Not that it seemed like anyone was coming. The development was mostly empty, one of those places that speaks of frustrated greed.

  She looked around. There wasn’t much to say who the man with the birthmark might have been. The granite countertops were shiny. The art on the walls was semi-abstract, figurative enough not to be alienating.

  In the bathroom, on the back of the toilet, the man’s neatly zippered Dopp kit—she’d heard that term somewhere, a World War II thing. A guest, then. A timesharer.

  The sound of the phone ringing came again from inside the guy’s pocket. She reached in and drew out the phone, a thin thing invisible beneath the pleats.

  Then she understood, in that slow-motion way of dreams, that it really was time to get out of there.

  At the door she felt a strange reluctance to turn away from the man on the bed, with his odd, yet somehow, she was sure, explicable characteristics.

  As she started back down the gallery, the extra height giving the stretch of desert an added grandeur, she sensed someone coming up the stairs behind her. She started running again, down toward the far end, toward the safety of the outdoor bar, the gaggle of tourists. Whoever it was, they must have seen her. She could only hope it was one of the silent, exhausted maids.

  *****

  The others felt lost to her. Maybe they were in that carpeted room, listening to the hard sell of the agent. Probably thinking she’d abandoned them to it.

  Afterwards, they put off going back to the boats—they could see them, swaying and bumping in the swell—and went to a restaurant that served roast chicken and big piles of French fries that came with salsa instead of ketchup. It was cheap and she was hungry again, with a deep hunger that felt like what it was, something secret and waiting. When the conversation lagged, she halfway thought about mentioning the man. But even if she’d decided to, he was somehow too big to fit into casual chatter. And what would they say? Would they encourage her to go to the police or forget it, they’d leave at the next weather window?

  As they were throwing away the tras
h, the phone rang. She turned away and pulled it out of her pocket. Just as the ringing was on the verge of stopping she opened it.

  *****

  In the end she slept well, as she always did, safely prone in the back cabin of the boat, her friends taking turns sharing the forward stateroom. The one whose turn was over had passed out on the couch in the saloon, uncomfortably angled because of the shape of the settee. The uneven sound of the waves along the hull, the rocking—they’d all go perfectly unconscious until light came sharply through the portholes.

  As she opened her eyes, she tried not to think about coffee, which was supposed to cause birth defects. The need to touch earth was overwhelming.

  She was not yet clumsy, she was not yet awkward. She paddled a kayak into shore and wandered the streets, listening to the exuberant buoyancy of casual conversation.

  Hours later she found herself turning a corner and seeing the backs of houses, a park that had been built in the wrong place, away from the flow of life. The sounds seemed to have faded. There was nothing but a breath of wind moving the few leaves of a tree, optimistically planted, that had failed to grow. She dismissed that as overly fanciful. She was making a practice of being more or less sensible—what she considered sensible, anyway. But she set off nonetheless toward the more heavily trafficked part of town.

  *****

  The side streets had not turned so torturously on the way here. The little houses all so empty, not even a few pieces of washing hung out to dry. A cock crowed. That was something, a robust screech that rose and fell, asserting itself. She heard flapping and the bird lifted itself to a rooftop, shimmery and multicolored, its tail feathers giving it a jaunty air.

  She turned another corner and the air went out of her. Things changed. Suddenly, her mind scrambling to catch up. She could no longer see. Sounds were muffled, as if coming across a great distance. She must have been in the back of a car—a big car, because she felt higher somehow. Higher and lighter, with the speed at which they (she and who?) were going. That was a novelty, being in a car. After months on a boat, the speed of a car felt ridiculous, unsustainable. They were taking her somewhere.