by Rob Hart
“This is a Mexican cartel.”
“And I’m a native New Yorker with a bad attitude. Anything else is bush league.”
“You’re not looking at me right now,” Crystal says. “But you need to know I rolled my eyes so hard I pulled something. Do you have a death wish?”
I turn, toss my hat onto the passenger seat through the open window. “Don’t worry. I’ll use my words.”
And I’m off.
It’s a long walk to the auto shop. The occasional bit of gravel or broken glass crunches under my boots. The sky is gray because Jesus, the sky is always fucking gray. Nearly the same gray as the concrete on the exterior of the shop.
The long walk scares me.
Not because of what might be there.
Six months ago and a million miles away, I stood in a man’s kitchen with a gun to his head. The gun wasn’t loaded. I didn’t actually want to shoot him, I wanted him to listen.
Which is a bit of a lie.
I did want to shoot him, but I chose not to.
The reason I was there was because the woman I loved was dead and he was responsible. She may not have loved me the way I loved her, but someone needed to restore balance to the universe. Make up for the fact that he was still breathing and she wasn’t.
But the route I took to that kitchen was littered with destruction. I was so intent on getting revenge I didn’t care who got hurt. Friends, people who weren’t involved, people who were trying to help me. I was like a wrecking ball. Lying to myself the whole time, telling myself I was doing the right thing while I smashed everything that stood in my way.
Bone-deep anger, the kind that’s imprinted onto your DNA by a catastrophic event, is like a bag of sand. It weighs you down, sometimes so much it takes your breath away, and you can’t think of anything to do but beat someone to death with it. And also the sand is a slow-acting poison, because this metaphor isn’t belabored enough.
That’s all to say, I couldn’t be that person, driven by nothing but hate. It would have burnt me up to cinder.
I still think about it sometimes, in dark moments. How it would have felt. What it would have looked like. Pulling the trigger. Ending his life the way he ended hers. But I didn’t.
I chose a different route.
And yet, here I am, retracing my own footsteps in the snow.
The thing that’s really scary about this walk to the auto shop is it feels so familiar. The lingering smell of the nicotine from Crystal’s cigarettes, clinging to my clothes, placing me back in time to where I liked to chain-smoke and hit things.
I push that feeling down. Think about that righteous path. Of taking the bullets out of the gun and throwing them into the harbor before I stood in that kitchen. Letting that monster live so he could rot in a cell.
A better place for him, a better place for me.
I think about those things so hard I feel like I’m going to snap.
The auto shop seems empty, the dingy, rusted gate pulled down, and through the door at the front, the lights are off. I go over and bang on it with the flat of my balled-up fist.
A few seconds pass. I figure I can climb up on the roof or go around back, see if there’s a way to break in. Maybe there’s something useful inside.
Still stupid to sneak in, but slightly less stupid than confronting a Mexican cartel head on.
Turns out, someone is home. A light pops on somewhere inside, reflecting through the window on the front door, which is crisscrossed with security wire on the inside of the glass. A sleepy-eyed Hispanic guy in a sleeveless T-shirt with tribal tattoos up and down his upper arms appears at the window. He squints at me and mutters something in Spanish, which I understand better than I speak, but I figure I can get through something simple.
“Pregunta,” I tell him. Question, I think.
He opens the door a crack. Not to let me in, but enough so he knows I can hear him.
“Cerrado,” he says. Closed, I think.
“Habla inglés?” I ask.
He shakes his head and closes the door, turns away.
“I’m looking for Dirk,” I yell through the window.
The man freezes. Looks at me over his shoulder.
I put my face closer to the window. “Dirk. I need to find him. Find. Uh, encontrar.”
The man comes back to the door and opens it. I can see him full now, and he’s a small guy, but tight, hammered out of iron. He smiles at me and puts his hand up, waves his fingers at me, beckoning me inside.
How could this possibly go wrong?
I follow him, and most of the lights inside the garage are off. We’re in a large room with spots for three cars to be worked on, lined up in a row. It smells like grease and gasoline and something sweet, like burning sugar.
Two of the spots in the garage are empty, cluttered with trays of tools and hydraulic devices. At the far end there’s a sedan that’s stripped down to the gunmetal-gray bones, the panels leaning up against the wall.
The car is probably being used for smuggling product and the fact that I’m seeing this can’t possibly be good, and that’s confirmed when the tattooed man spins and body-checks me into a rolling cart loaded with tools that spill and scatter across the oil-stained floor.
I fall to the floor in a jumble, tools bouncing off me, the clatter of them echoing in the corners of the dark garage. I try to stand and the tattooed man grips my arms, digging fingers into my biceps from behind, and pulls me to my feet.
He pushes me forward and he has great leverage. I can’t fight, can’t get away. He slams me into a workbench, his body crushing mine, his hand pushing my face down so I can’t see. There’s something sharp and cold under my cheek.
There’s another Hispanic guy standing off to the side now, watching us, like he’s been standing there the whole time. Not even too far away, like if I had a free hand I could just about reach him. He’s wearing greasy coveralls and a pair of safety goggles on top of his head. I stop struggling and the guy holding me stops pushing, but doesn’t let up.
“What do you know about Dirk, homes?” asks the man in the coveralls, in heavily accented English.
“I don’t know anything about him. I need to find him.”
“Why do you need to find him?”
“He’s got a kid with him. I need to find the kid.”
The mechanic shrugs. “I don’t know nothing about a kid. All I know is Dirk owes us money and now some motherfucker is here looking for him. Maybe you’re here to see what you can score off us?”
“I knocked. What kind of asshole rips off dealers by knocking?”
He leans against the workbench, looking across the garage. “Who said what we do here?”
“Lucky guess?”
“You seem to know a lot about us.”
“I don’t know anything. I didn’t see anything. I’m looking for a girl. A little girl, man. She got taken from her mom and I need to get her back.”
The man in the coveralls pushes away from the bench and leans toward me, looking me in the eyes. They’re like pieces of slate, heavy and unmoving. They crush me almost as hard as the guy holding me down. He says, “Do you know how much Dirk owes us?”
“I don’t care what Dirk did.”
The man in the coveralls says, “Ten grand.”
“Tell me where you think he might be, I’ll bring the money back. Fuck, man, I don’t give a shit about Dirk. He sounds like an asshole. I just need to find him.”
The man in the coveralls stands up and says, “I don’t know where he is.”
“I guess we’re at an impasse?”
“We are. I’ve got two problems.” He disappears from my field of view. The place is filled with silence, the sound of my breath exploding across the table, the creak of the bench I’m being pressed into. My heart is slamming into my chest so hard I’m a little dizzy.
There’s a clatter of a metal tool being picked up and dropped onto a hard surface.
CLANG.
And another.
CLANG.
Each one making me flinch, chipping away at my bravado.
The tattooed man laughs.
I think I got a little ahead of myself, thinking this would be a quick q-and-a.
“The problem,” the man is the coveralls says, “is that you even know we’re here, which you can imagine is bad for business. That, and I don’t give a fuck about some little girl. Ten G’s I do give a fuck about, so I would say my desire to find Dirk is greater than yours.”
“I feel like we’re not doing a great job of communicating here…”
There’s a rumbling noise and a huge suck of air. It feels like a fan. Like the air in the garage is suddenly lighter. The man in the coveralls appears again. He’s holding a long bronze nozzle attached to a hose.
“I want to know everything that you know, homes,” he says. “We can do this easy or hard. Do we have to do it hard? Then it’s balloon time.” He squeezes the lever on the nozzle and a hard burst of air shoots out. So strong I can see the white gust of it. He looks over my shoulder and says, “Baje sus pantalones.”
Take down his pants.
I think I know where this is going.
Fuck.
Fucking fuck.
I kick out as hard as I can. There’s resistance and a crunch, and the guy holding me screams from someplace primal. Figure I got him in the knee, and when his grip loosens on me I don’t waste time looking back, just throw all my weight into him.
He falls off and I rush at the mechanic. There’s a wrench as big as my forearm and thick as my wrist sitting on the workbench so I pick it up and it’s so heavy I need two hands to swing it.
I smash it across his cheek. His head jerks around and his body begins to fall but I don’t even see where he lands, because I drop the wrench and I’m out the door as soon as I’m at the end of the arc.
Outside there’s a trace of sun and it stings my eyes before it disappears behind a veil of clouds. I run at the car. Crystal is sitting in the driver’s seat. She sees me running and leans over to pop the passenger side door. I vault over the car, stumble on the sidewalk, throw myself into the seat, and yell at her to drive before I even get the door closed.
We’re a good two miles away before my heart stops screaming. Before I feel comfortable that no one is following us and I can turn around in the seat.
Crystal asks, “What the fuck was that about?”
“Dirk owes them money. They wanted to pump me for information.”
Oh, I didn’t even mean it like that. I do a full-body cringe at the thought of what they were planning.
“So, did they try to beat you up or something?”
“They were going to shove an air compressor up my ass and turn it on.”
Crystal doesn’t say anything to that.
I’ve had guns and knives pulled on me. Been beaten on pretty hard. Even been shot once. I’ve seen some shit. Being turned into a human balloon is taking things to the next level.
Crystal asks, “Do you think they’re following us?”
“Doesn’t look like it. There were only two of them, I think. Busted one of their kneecaps. Brained the other with a wrench.”
“Ash, are you fucking kidding?”
“They did try to tear a hole in my colon. When you’re threatened with something like that, the rules of engagement go out the window.”
Crystal jerks the wheel and pulls the car to the side of the road, nearly killing a biker, who shakes his fist before taking off, his reflective yellow vest disappearing into the distance.
She grips the steering wheel so tight her knuckles go white. For a few moments she’s completely still. Then she slams her fist against the steering wheel. Three, four, five times.
“Ash,” she says, fighting at holding something back. “What the fuck are we going to do?”
I stare out at the empty street, grinding the gears in my head.
What’s the next step?
“He pissed off a cartel,” I say, feeling it out. “He owes them money. So that means it’s not safe to stay here, right? He’s got to be leaving town. Does he have a car?”
“No. And his license is suspended.”
“Then he’s probably not driving. If he gets pulled over he’s going to be in a shitload of trouble.”
“And nobody is going to trust him with a car,” Crystal says.
“Maybe the airport?”
Crystal takes a deep breath. “He has an inner-ear thing. It hurts to fly. If he was going to leave he would take a train or a bus.”
“So if I wanted to take a train or a bus, where would I go?”
“Portland Union Station. Whenever he goes anywhere it’s out of there. It’s on the west side of the river.”
“Let’s go. We’ll hang out for a bit. Ask around, see if anyone saw him. And if it doesn’t pan out, maybe we revisit going to the cops, take our chances. Because other than that, I’ve got nothing. I can’t think of anything else.”
Crystal nods slowly. There’s a very brief moment when I think she’s going to cry. The muscles in her face pulling tight. But she puts the car in drive and slowly pulls away from the curb, her face blank.
I hold my hands in my lap, clasp them together to keep them from shaking. Close my eyes. Try not to think of the crunch of that asshole’s knee. And the other guy, the way his body went slack after I hit him, like something left his body.
I try not to think about those things, so of course, it’s all I can think about.
Outside it’s overcast but still a bright gray, the sun hollering from behind the clouds. I push the thoughts in my head around like furniture, try to focus on something else.
And it’s now, sitting across from Crystal, in the smell of nicotine and citrus, I realize how much I don’t know about her.
I’ve seen her naked more times than I can count. I know her areolas are darker than you would expect on such cream-white skin. She wears outfits cobbled together out of secondhand stores, and she strips to ’80s pop, like Nena and Erasure and Soft Cell. So many dancers in Portland have tattoos, like it’s required to get into the club, but she doesn’t have any. People notice. Sometimes they come in and ask for the girl without the tattoos.
Music and her naked body. I know her in a way that’s almost intimate and that still doesn’t mean I know anything about her.
One thing I do know is that through this whole thing she’s kept herself collected. Whether that’s for her benefit or mine, I’m not sure. But only now is that desperation and frustration shining through the cracks. It makes me wish I was doing a better job. That I had a better idea than to go to a train station and hope by some magical fucking coincidence Dirk is there.
More than that, I want to find the kid.
Kids don’t deserve drama like this.
The headrest pushes my hat into my eyes so I take it off and put it in my lap. Crystal drives like we’re in a rocket ship. We approach a four-way stop and there are two cars sitting across from each other, the drivers waving at each other, trying to let the other go first, and she weaves around them without pausing.
We drive past streets that are familiar, until she ducks down a side street and we’re in a whole new part of town. I try to remember the turns, the landmarks, the storefronts. Figure this place out.
She asks, “So what is it you ran from?”
“What do you mean?”
“Your friend said to call your mom. You didn’t seem to want to.”
“I wasn’t running,” I tell her. “Me and my mom love each other. There’s a lot there in the valley in between us.”
“Trouble with your dad?”
“Only trouble I have with my dad is that he’s dead.”
Crystal pauses. “I’m sorry.”
“Nothing for you to be sorry about.”
“Can I ask how he died?”
Shrug. “You can ask.”
“All right. How’d you end up in Portland?”
“You ask a lot of questions.”
Her knuckles are still white gripping the wheel.
She steals a glance at me before looking back at the road.
“When I left New York I started out in Austin,” I tell her. “Too hot. Checked out Los Angeles and I got a bad vibe. Heard good things about Portland so I came up here. It’s pretty. Like a city grew out of the middle of the forest. And the coffee is good. But it’s too quiet. I’m looking around for what’s next.”
As I’m talking there’s a car in front of us doing ten miles under the speed limit. We’re on a narrow residential block, so Crystal can’t get around without going into oncoming traffic. She speeds up, practically riding the bumper, trying to get the person to drive faster, which isn’t happening.
I point at the car. “That frustration you’re feeling right now? Wanting the person in front of you to go quicker? It’s like that. Being trapped inside that feeling. And the worst part is, this place still reminds me of the worst parts of New York.”
“How is this anything like New York?”
“It’s like Williamsburg Junior. Same vibe. Goofy fucking hipster kids who are nostalgic for things they never knew.”
“What does that even mean, to call someone a hipster? Isn’t it kind of a meaningless term? If all it means is young and hip, you’re a hipster, too.”
“First off, I’m not hip. Second, it’s like porn. You know it when you see it.”
Crystal roots around for another cigarette, lights it. “You’re full of shit, but I think you know that. How do you even have friends?”
“You mean Bombay?” I ask her. “We grew up together. He’s good to me. I wish I could return the favor.”
Crystal opens her mouth and inhales a gulp of air, like she’s about to launch into something and stops herself.
We pause at a red light and she turns to me. “You seem pretty down on yourself. In a general sense.”
I shrug at her. “Like I said, I’m not a good person. I’m trying to get to the next thing in one piece.”
