by Paul Levine
Seemingly amused again, Shank turned to Max. “How ‘bout it, boss man, should we leave? Should we vacate the premises?”
Max started to say something, but nothing came out. He seemed to be nailed to the sofa and to have lost the power of speech. He meekly turned his palms upward in a gesture of surrender.
“Max is plumb out of ideas,” Shank said, “so I’ll do the talking. In case you missed it the first time, you’ll fuck the judge till he’s blue in the face. You’ll fuck him till he’s cross-eyed. You’ll fuck him till he’s deaf, dumb, and blind. You’ll turn him upside down and inside out and suck him dry. And when he’s so dizzy he doesn’t know his own name, you’ll get his vote because he’ll do any damn thing you ask.”
Stunned, a flood of bitter memories swept over her: her father telling her that she’d always be able to make a living on her back, the guys at the Tiki offering her wads of bills to meet them in the parking lot after closing, Crockett trying to pimp for her, then beating her up when she wouldn’t go through with it. Max had protected her then; now, he was pushing her into it. The realization came to her with sickening clarity. After all these years, Max had become her pimp!
“In short, Lisa,” Shank went on, seeming to enjoy every moment, licking each word with his tongue, “you’ll do the judge just like you did old Max here, though frankly, jailbait pussy was probably sweeter. That so, Max? Was it better in the old days?”
“Now Shank, there’s no need for that,” Max said, standing up but not moving toward the other man. Not leaping across the room and decking the foul-mouthed pig, which is what Lisa imagined Scrap Truitt would have done. She pictured Truitt slugging the swine, breaking his jaw, citing some principle of natural law that empowers a man to defend his woman’s honor.
“Oh, ex-cuse me,” Shank said, dragging out the words, taunting them both. “You two were in love. The horny executive whose wife didn’t understand him and the stripper with the genius IQ who could suck the chrome off a trailer hitch.”
She slapped him, the cr-aack of hand on skin seeming to echo in the apartment. Finally, Max moved, dancing around the coffee table, coming up to Shank, apologizing, begging forgiveness, the girl doesn’t get it yet, it’s not her fault, Jeez Shank, it’ll be okay.
“Shut up, Max,” Shank said with a certainty that his order would be followed.
It suddenly occurred to Lisa that if Max was afraid of Shank, she probably should be, too. Who was he, anyway?
Shank turned back to Lisa and lowered his voice to a frightening whisper. “You’re not fully aware of the situation here, Lisa, and I’m taking that into account. Max has protected you, and I let him. I didn’t want to embarrass him, to cut off his balls in public, so I always walked two steps behind him, like the wife of the Japanese emperor. Except now, I’m a little tired of getting fucked up the ass. It’s important for you to know exactly how it is, to appreciate Max’s position and your own.”
He’s talking about Max as if he weren’t here. But then, he really isn’t.
Shank smiled at her, but it was the smile of the wolf contemplating the hen. Then his right hand shot out, quick as a snake, and seized her by the. wrist. His left hand grabbed her above the right elbow, and he twisted hard, spinning her around, bending the arm painfully until the back of her hand pressed against her shoulder blade. She couldn’t see his face as he spat out the words, “You’re nothing but a little slut who’s forgotten where she belongs. You think you’re smart, but if you were, you would have sized up the situation long ago. You would have shown respect. You would have had fear.”
He cranked her arm higher, and a searing pain shot through her shoulder. She thought of a chicken’s wishbone snapping in two.
He leaned even closer to her, brushing his lips through her hair, exhaling foul breath. “Do you know why they call me Shank?”
“It’s … it’s your name,” she said, confused.
“No! My name is Shakanian. A shank is a blade that cuts fast and deep. I’m a knife, and I’ll cut right to the meat of you. Do you understand?”
“Yes.” But she didn’t understand. It was beyond comprehension.
“What do you know about me, Lisa?”
“Nothing,” she said, her voice barely a whisper.
“So let me tell you. I live alone. I don’t have a wife or a friend or a parakeet. What I’ve got is a lot of time to think. Lately, I’ve been thinking about you and how much you owe Max here, which really means how much you owe Atlantica. Do you follow me, Lisa?”
Wordlessly, fighting the pain, she nodded.
“Good.” He released the pressure on her arm slightly but did not let go. “Do you like the movies, Lisa?”
Whether it was the pain or the fear, or the utter inanity of the question—for a second, she thought he was asking her out—Lisa couldn’t answer.
“I’ll bet you do,” he said. “I’ll bet you like foreign films with subtitles or love stories with sappy endings. Me, I go to the movies by myself, and I like to laugh, forget my troubles. So I see the comedies. Reservoir Dogs, Bad Lieutenant, Natural Born Killers. Ever see any of them?”
“They’re not comedies,” she heard herself say.
“Sure they are. Take the scene in Reservoir Dogs. One of the robbers has a cop tied up. He wants to know who’s the informant in the gang. The cop won’t tell him, so the robber cuts his ear off.”
With his free hand, Shank roughly grabbed Lisa’s ear, twisting it, painfully. “Now, here’s the funny part. I’d already done it. I cut a guy’s ear off maybe ten, twelve years before I saw the movie. So I’m watching it, thinking you don’t get that much blood from an ear. That wasn’t realistic. But the screams. The screams were real.”
He’s a madman, and he’s going to cut me.
She knew a girl from the Tiki whose jealous boyfriend slashed her breasts to keep her from dancing. Lisa was paralyzed with fear. Her eyes searched frantically to see if he was holding a knife.
He let go of her ear and his hand brushed against her neck, seductively, stopping to fondle the single pearl earring. Then he kissed her neck, and unleashing his tongue like a serpent, he licked her. With a repulsive slurping sound, his tongue slithered up the slope of her neck.
I’m going to throw up. Jesus, if he doesn’t stop, I’m going to …
His tongue withdrew and his teeth clenched the pearl earring, holding it there a second, freezing her with terror. Then he wrenched his head downward, ferociously tearing the post through her earlobe, yanking it free with a twist of his head like a pit bull mauling its prey.
She screamed as the pain shot through her, the sensation of her own shredding skin terrifying her.
Max stood, frozen in place.
Shank twisted her arm even higher against her shoulder blade. “Do you have fear now, Lisa? Do you have respect?”
Blinking through tears, she begged him, “Please! Please stop.”
“Say it, bitch!” Again he twisted her arm, until she thought the ligaments would tear loose from the bones.
“I have fear,” she cried, eyes squeezed shut, her shoulder screaming in agony. “I have respect.”
He let her go. Her arm throbbed. Her ear stung. Blood dribbled from her earlobe. She felt faint.
“Good,” Shank said, pocketing the bloody earring like spare change. “I’ve got confidence in you, Lisa. When you’re through with the judge, he’ll vote to revoke the Constitution if you ask him to. You do your job, Lisa, we’ve got no problems.” He flashed a smile as jagged as a cracked eggshell. “You don’t, I’ll take your other earring and the ear, too.”
He said it softly, matter-of-factly, without anger. Max hurried to Lisa’s side and wrapped his arms around her just as her legs buckled.
Still speaking in a hushed voice, Shank said, “Now why don’t you take a little walk so Max can bring you up to speed?”
Silently, Max guided her to the door. She was too shocked, too much in pain, to protest. As she stepped into the corridor, Lisa took
one look back inside the apartment. Shank was lighting another cigarette. He took a deep drag, then tossed the match onto her Persian rug.
CHAPTER 6
The Shoe Box
SAMUEL ADAMS TRUITT MAY HAVE BECOME A JUSTICE of the Supreme Court but at home, he still carried out the trash. And walked the dog, a russet-haired mutt with retriever and shepherd blood named Sopchoppy, Sop for short. And verbally sparred with his wife, Connie, she of the patrician good looks and slashing wit. And on regular cycles, for the past two years, he gave his wife twice daily injections of Pergonal plus a 5 A.M. blood test, all aimed at increasing her egg production so that with the help of a fertility expert, a petri dish, and divine intervention, they could enjoy the benefits of parenthood.
So far, the in vitro fertilization had not worked. All the ultrasounds, all the drugs with their chaotic mood-altering side effects, all the hours in the doctor’s office squeezing her hand while a scope was inserted through her abdomen into the ovaries, all the needles depositing fertilized eggs into the uterus … all for nothing.
For a while, he thought the experience brought them together. It was one of the few remaining areas of common passion or even interest. They laughed over Truitt’s discomfort at walking into the OB-GYN’s waiting room filled with suspicious women, then disappearing into a rest room to masturbate into a plastic cup.
“Was it good for you?” she had asked.
“My hands were too cold,” he replied, “so the nurse helped.”
Connie had shown him endless wallpaper patterns, paint chips, and photos clipped from Architectural Digest as they set about planning the nursery. Sam Truitt didn’t know calico from chintz, and in fact spent several years of bachelorhood with window coverings of old bedsheets, but he took an interest in the mythical nursery for the mythical baby because it made Connie happy.
But lately, after so many misses, after Connie’s headaches and nausea, exuberant hopes followed by deep despair, after more than twenty-thousand dollars in medical bills, there was little talk of babies and bassinets. Connie’s moods had become both extreme and unpredictable. She would burst into tears at the sight of a pregnant woman or laugh hysterically at inopportune times.
Today, Truitt knew, Connie had been to the doctor to see if the latest implant of a fertilized egg or “pre-embryo,” in Dr. Kalstone’s lingo, had taken hold.
God, let her be pregnant.
Sam Truitt wanted to be a father; he wanted Connie to be happy; and he wanted to preserve his marriage. At the moment, all three were in jeopardy.
He had just stuffed a bulging garbage bag into the plastic curbside container. He had walked and pooper-scooped Sop, fed and brushed him, and told him he was sorry there were no game birds to chase in the neighborhood.
Carrying the recycle container to join the garbage at the curb, Truitt opened the gate in the black wrought iron fence to what was laughingly called their front yard. It was a rectangular space of dry brown grass roughly large enough for a single grave. One block away was the old Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, the narrow manmade waterway where tourists now ride in mule-drawn boats and locals hike and jog along a towpath lined with giant sycamores and willows.
The cramped town house was only twenty-seven feet wide—fifteen feet shorter than his snap to the punter—but stood three stories high. It was, Connie told him, a shoe box standing on end.
But it was in Georgetown, which is where she wanted to live. Insisted on it, really. Her family’s second home had been here when she was growing up, when her father was a U.S. senator from Connecticut. That house was three times the size of this one. But property was cheaper then, and her mother’s inheritance fueled not only Daddy’s political career but also a lifestyle far in excess of what an elected official could provide.
Truitt walked up two flights of stairs to the bedroom, eager to hear about Connie’s visit to the doctor but apprehensive at the same time. She sat at her vanity applying makeup, seemingly oblivious to his presence.
If she’s silent, does it mean she’s not pregnant? No, the husband is not permitted to draw an adverse inference from the wife’s failure to testify.
At thirty-eight, Connie was a striking woman whose fine bone structure, manner, and posture spoke of cultured breeding and expensive schooling. Truitt did a fancy sidestep to get around her without banging her elbow. “At home, I had my own sitting room,” she said in greeting, as if reading his mind about the tight confines of the town house.
At home.
Home being Waltham, Massachusetts. Home being where they had spent the bulk of their not entirely happy marriage. Home not being where they now lived.
“It’s the nineties,” he replied. “Downsizing is in. I read it in USA Today.”
“Sam, you don’t read USA Today.”
She kept her eyes on the mirror, where she was smoothing a glistening liquid on her lips. Whatever happened to simple lipstick? He could not keep up with women’s fashions. Sam Truitt could tell you what Thomas Paine had for breakfast the day he wrote, “These are the times that try men’s souls,” but he was oblivious to what his wife wore to the Kennedy Center last Saturday night, coincidentally, to see a revival of 1776. Or, for that matter, the names of the two couples—her friends not his—with whom they shared an après-theater supper, her expression, not his.
He dodged around the bed and opened the door to what the broker had called the walk-in closet but which would not accommodate anyone with shoulders wider than the average coat hanger. Connie’s clothing took up all of her side and most of his. He stripped down to his underwear, straight-armed a number of her cocktail dresses, and hung up his suit. Feeling claustrophobic and not wanting to jitterbug past Connie like Emmitt Smith squeezing through the off-tackle hole, Truitt sat on the edge of the bed with its duvet of roses and hyacinths and looked at his wife in the vanity mirror.
He couldn’t stand it any longer. “How did it go today?”
“I had lunch with Stephanie,” she said, her eyes meeting his in the glass.
Objection! Not responsive. Your Honor, please admonish the witness to answer the question.
“They’re building a gazebo in their backyard,” Connie continued.
Truitt pondered this tidbit of news. Just what does one say to a wife whose sister is building a gazebo in the backyard of her showy two-million-dollar home? That it will be a nice addition to her Jacuzzi, lap pool, and sauna? That it must be nice being married to a lobbyist whose basic claim to fame is being the son-in-law of a former senator—fame enough to make $850,000 a year, more than five times the salary of a Supreme Court justice.
“Gazebos are nice,” he said, prudently.
“She showed me the plans. It has a gas grill, a microwave, dishwasher, full-size refrigerator, plus an ice-cream fountain and a wet bar with two beer taps.”
Why is she dragging it out? Am I going to be a father or not?
“What, no roller coaster?”
“There’s no need to be sarcastic,” she said. “Or a snob.”
“What!”
“A reverse snob, actually.”
He was stumped. “What does that mean, that I look down on people who are better than I am?”
“No, you look down on people who have attained goals which you think are”—she paused to find the right word, searching the breadth and depth of her Bryn Mawr-Sorbonne vocabulary—“inconsequential or frivolous.”
“I cop a plea,” he said. “Guilty as charged. What are the sentencing guidelines for a repeat offender?”
“Life,” she said, “without parole.”
He smiled with real pleasure. That was the old Connie. In the fencing match that was their life, a parry was usually followed by a thrust. Sometimes he yearned for the early days when they made each other laugh and competed to see who had the sharper wit. Connie usually won.
He watched his wife lift her long, chestnut hair into some impossible upswept pile that she clasped with several silver barrettes. Most of the time, she wore
her hair parted in the middle, where it fell, long and swingy, across her shoulders. It made her look like a college coed. Now, with her hair up, she looked regal, Princess of the Capitol, with a long, slender neck and prominent cheekbones, her dark hair set off by flawless porcelain skin.
He pondered the nature of their relationship. Did he love her? Maybe it wasn’t a raging passion, but there was still care and affection and occasionally, warmth.
Sam Truitt had met Constance Parham at her family’s third home, the summer cottage on Nantucket. Truitt was an assistant professor at Harvard Law with no particular interest in politics, but he had a professed animosity toward many of President Reagan’s appointees to the federal bench. Senator Lowell Parham was the senior Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, and after reading one of Truitt’s diatribes in The New Republic, he began calling on him to draft questions for judicial appointees considered unqualified.
Truitt was not ordinarily an introspective man, but he thought now of the forces that had brought him to Connie. Constance Parham was eight years his junior, just finishing up a graduate degree in art history when they met. He remembered the instant attraction to this tall, sassy brunette with a quick wit and a lethal tongue. She had the clean WASP features of her mother, a high forehead with a widow’s peak, a wide smile, and the gift of her father’s laughter and intelligence. Connie could hold her martinis, crack wise, and beat most men at tennis.
Looking back now, Truitt thought he fell in love with the family. The senator was a liberal without being a sissy, a Harvard intellectual who liked to hunt, fish, and drink bourbon. His wife was a descendant of Massachusetts Puritans who made several fortunes in New England textile mills and had the foresight to shift their wealth into Arizona real estate just before their businesses succumbed to foreign competition. Alice Parham adored her husband, who returned her love in both public and private displays of affection. Constance Parham grew up with the benefits of status and privilege, boarding school in Europe, a college curriculum that required a commute to Paris, and an endless supply of eligible suitors, some Cabots, some Lodges, some Kennedys. And one Truitt.
