Muscle

by Alan Trotter

  I sat backstage while _____ talked with Fylan about things that didn’t concern me, which is how _____ would sometimes describe all the things that concerned me that he didn’t want me to have a say in.

  The only thing going on was practice, and even practice was taking a break. The girls came through, standing and sitting, rubbing sore thighs, tugging each other’s hair. They had on little or no make-up, hair tied back, all twelve within an inch of the same height, all wearing show shoes that glittered and their own clothes that didn’t.

  One of the girls was being teased by the rest. They took turns with snide remarks about her as their attention and their cigarettes allowed.

  She had been called Diamond, but had changed her name to Dorothy when she started dancing. The other girls couldn’t believe that her parents had given her this gift, this perfect name for the sort of stage they kicked their heels on, and she had changed it. This is what they were teasing her about, but why they were teasing her was obvious. It was because when all these girls walked into a room, she was the one you saw. She had darkly shining, hooded eyes, and there was something about her, even in the loose, ill-fitting clothes she’d worn to practice, that made your imagination slip its leash, whether or not you knew you had one. Eleven other beautiful girls, and against her they were all flashlights at a summer picnic.

  Dorothy watched this scene, the backstage teasing, like she was waiting for her cue. She had one leg crossed over the other and held a cigarette between two steepled fingers, while she rubbed a thread of dropped tobacco between two of the fingers on her other hand and looked twice as good as breakfast.

  Eventually the other girls had all laughed themselves hoarse with jealousy. Dorothy put out her cigarette and, before she stood, slapped her hands against her legs. It was a man’s gesture, and then as soon as she was standing there was no trace of it. She was deliberate—she could have been on screen or painted on canvas. When she began to speak it was over the last of the chatter, but it sounded like a long silence had just been broken.

  As she talked she told the other girls some ugly truths, and she didn’t care that they hurt. And you’d have wanted her to tell you ugly hurtful things too, just so she’d look you in the eye while she did it and you’d get to know that thoughts of you were moving those lips.

  She told them how it had never mattered what her name was. She pronounced each of the other girls’ names in turn, and made each sound boring and leaden, and you could tell they hated themselves for not being able to think a bad thought about this Dorothy’s posture, or her looks, or her tall, firm body, or her callous, impeccable mouth. She told them that they needed their names to get noticed. She didn’t. When she’d grown up in her own little no-horse town, a big-city photographer approached her on the street, asking her to model for him, and she’d said no because he dressed cheap. Would they have done that? Wasn’t it the sort of thing they dreamed would ever happen to them in their own no-horse towns?

  She’d been pacing slowly, her calf getting taut as each heel placed itself on the ground, first her left leg then her right then the left again in a way that demanded constant attention. And now she came over to me and sat on my lap and tangled her legs around each other and gave a yawn that stretched her out from top to tail.

  ‘I knew I was going to be here tonight, out front and centre, even then,’ she said. She looped her arm as far across my shoulders as it would go and swung her dangling legs playfully. She’d made me into a prop for her, into her stage. It was exciting. ‘I love you all, and I need you all. Because a room is just so boring without wallpaper, don’t you think?’ She took a long drag on her cigarette and let the smoke spill from her nostrils and lazily unfurl into my eyes.

  A weary man with his sleeves rolled up came and clapped his hands at them, until they all put out their lights and went back to practice, eleven cute little tricks and one name for the playbill.

  *

  Then _____ reappeared, looking aggrieved.

  He patted an envelope impatiently against his thigh, jerked his head toward the exit with a brisk whistle between his front teeth and I followed him out. In the street _____ pulled the lip of the envelope back with a finger to show me the contents and flicked through them with his thumb. The envelope was full of notes—twenties mainly but fifties too, enough to keep us going for a month or more. He took out about half of the pile and handed it to me.

  He told me I could go get a coffee, take in a show. I could go bark at cars for all he cared. Jarecki had said there wasn’t any work going, wouldn’t be anything for us to do for a while. This was to tide us over. Then he pulled his pack of cigarettes from his jacket pocket and gave a sharp twitch of his hand, as if he had been about to toss the packet into the air and immediately thought better of it, so that one of the pills jumped half clear of the rest.

  I looked through the money he’d given me a couple of times and told him I thought I’d go get a steak.

  So the two of us went and sat in a place and ordered two rare steaks from the waiter, with one beer and one glass of water to go with them.

  _____ finished the beer as soon as it hit the table. As he ordered a second, we got the smell of the butter and the onions hitting the pan, and we moved to sit at the counter in front of the grill, so we could get more of it. _____ was having the onions with his steak, I was just having the steak, and it was good and properly rare.

  After we’d finished _____ took a third beer and I had one too, though I don’t drink beer often. I don’t like the feeling of being drunk because I don’t like not being able to choose not to be drunk any longer, but I could see some value in it, in a day when there was nothing else to be done. And when that beer was done we had another, and ordered some more onions, not to eat, just so we’d get the smell again as they were cooked.

  It was maybe four in the afternoon, but we were both tired, the sort of tiredness you get from doing nothing, the sort of tiredness you get if you watch other people exhaust themselves.

  *

  Back at the apartment we brushed our teeth at the sink. _____ is more thorough than me and I was done first. I reached forward with a glass to fill it at the tap, and almost got it filled with the last of _____’s spitting, and we apologised, each to the other.

  Then _____ got into the bed and I lay down on the mattress on the floor and we slept through the day, which was the Tuesday, and on Wednesday we threw cards from a deck across the room into _____’s hat, _____ sitting in his vest and shorts.

  For those three days having nothing to do felt like ease and calm, and _____’s company was almost good enough to keep, but through the Thursday, while _____ threw more cards and smoked cigarettes, I had the feeling my skin was tightening, like someone had found a crank that fitted in the base of my neck, in a socket hidden by the line of my hair, and was turning it, and with each gear half an inch of skin was threaded into my spine, until I was a tenpound soul squeezed into a five-pound sack.

  Maybe _____ had a tightening crank of his own. By the Thursday morning he took to drinking. He cursed Jarecki and he cursed Fylan, and he said that they were lucky if he didn’t take their little city from them and grind it under his heel. He said that a man who couldn’t at any moment point to a dozen necks he’d like snapped was a man without imagination who didn’t deserve to be in charge of a poem, let alone a city. And if Jarecki had necks that needed snapped and he wasn’t sending them our way then—

  But who knows what then, because _____’s irritation made the glass he had in his grip explode into pieces. He screamed curses at me and Jarecki and the glass and the city for half of a count to 100. 100 being the number I had chosen to count to before I popped him in the jaw and we would see where that took us. At fifty he went quiet and together we picked up the fragments of the glass. _____ got himself another and drank with renewed concentration.

  He was well passed out when the writer, the Astonishing Holcomb, came to the door.

  *

  As I opened the doo
r to Holcomb, all the thinking I had done on his story came back to me, and it took me a moment to get out what I had to say, which was that _____ was passed out drunk.

  He waited longer than he had to before he replied. He hung a second of silence out in which to look at me like a son of a bitch—a second of sneering judgement on the time it had taken me to say my part. I thought of the carefully posed way he smoked cigarettes at the card table, and thought again how maybe I ought to put his teeth down his throat.

  ‘I was hoping I could buy you a coffee, Box,’ he said. Then his eyes broke from me and he looked like just the scrawny kid in a suit he was, and scared too. ‘I bought a train ticket.’ He lifted it out of the pocket of the jacket he was carrying slung over his arm and waved it. ‘To get out of town. I was on my way to the station when it occurred to me that you might be able to help me.’

  He was licked with sweat, it bloomed out from the armpits of his shirt and out from the sunken middle of his boy’s chest. There wasn’t any joke in his eyes, there wasn’t the superior little brain that sneered at you across a hand of poker, just a timid child. He returned the ticket and pulled back on his hair. I told him I’d come and get a coffee.

  *

  In the coffee joint he sat, then just about turned a somersault squirming to see the door. ‘Do you mind if we exchange seats?’ he said. ‘Recently I like being able to see who’s coming.’

  I stood up and he cowered like he hadn’t just asked a favour. Then he skittered round the far side of the table into my place. He took a flask from his jacket and a guilty swig from the flask, worried the teacher might see him and tell him off. He put on a pair of big, wire-rimmed glasses I’d never seen him wear. ‘Not much point being able to see the door if I can’t tell who’s opened it.’ Then: ‘I wondered,’ he said, ‘I wondered, Box, if you had any spare time. If you were at a loose end at all.’

  I nodded. I was a handful of loose and frayed and itching ends.

  We sat in silence for a while. He looked to be thinking. Nerves jogged him in his seat like he was rattling along in a train carriage. He didn’t know where to put his hands until we had two coffees, then he clung to his like it was a ladder over a snake-pit.

  ‘I’m in some trouble,’ he said. ‘There is a man who quite wants to kill me.’ He laughed as if this was an embarrassing story he could hardly believe himself. ‘At least, he told me he does, and I’ve started to worry that he might be serious. As I said, I’d made the decision to get on a train and leave the city, but a thought took me and brought me to your door.’

  I mentioned how it was _____’s door he’d come to.

  ‘Yes, but I was relieved when you answered it. To be honest, his presence never does much to make me feel safer, somehow.’ He smiled and took a drink of his coffee. ‘That’s what I need, someone who can make me feel safer, until this difficulty has found some kind of resolution.’ The coffee or the flask or the conversation must have been comforting him because he no longer rattled in his seat. ‘This is not a situation where I need someone to crack a case by tracking down leads and figuring out the angles. I need some muscle to sit dumb and close at hand, so that if this man who wants to kill me appears, you can deal with him.’

  The fear in him had begun to creep away and in its place the conceited poker player was being reassembled. He started to describe the man and the nature of his difficulty and I told him I didn’t care. It knocked him back five minutes: he was just a small boy in glasses again, scared for his neck. He went quiet and sat in prayer or otherwise distracted by the table.

  To pull him out of it and get on with something I asked if he had money. He scrambled a pile of it out of his pocket, and I let him count some out. When it seemed enough to be starting with, I took it.

  *

  He spent the walk to the tram knitting back together his awful personality. He talked a little about how it would have been ridiculous for him to leave town—that he’d never allow himself to be bullied from his home. He talked about the cleverness of this new arrangement he had made with me, and I got the impression that he felt that either I or the whole city should have been carrying him on our shoulders. I wondered whether _____ might have come to and sobered up yet, and decided with a little regret that probably not.

  We rode the tram to the far end of the line going south. His building stood on the far corner from the stop, alongside a phone booth. It was dark brick, with small windows: it looked like a fort. Holcomb’s place was on the second floor and he quietened down again when we went in, as if he was ashamed, though there wasn’t much of anything there. If he had fled town all there would have been left of him was a minimum of furniture spread across two small rooms, piles of books that spilled across the floor or stood without resolve in stacks, some empty bottles in one corner arranged like skittles in an alley and, on the desk: a typewriter in a black case that made it appear tank-like, two stacks of paper, a cheap lamp, and some kind of pitted, copper-coloured metal ball the size of a grapefruit.

  All of the windows were on the far wall and looked directly onto the brick face of the neighbouring building, which had taken as much as a half-step back to give Holcomb room to breathe.

  He had me help him pull his desk away from the wall. He took the chair around it so he would be facing into the room, sat, spun the typewriter on its stomach to face him and removed the case, then fed the machine a sheet of paper. Then he set to write, and on the basis that I’d taken some money to watch him, I sat down on a sunken brown couch and watched him.

  He tapped a few keys gingerly so he wouldn’t wake anyone or disturb the sheet of paper. He got up, smoked a cigarette at the window, then went back to the desk. He tugged at his hair and his face and his tie and his shirtsleeves like he was hoping to pick words out of them.

  I thought the way he approached his work was slow going, but there was also about it something placid. He seemed to need to reach a state of peace beneath his empty bottles and gaze of the bricks through the windows. He built a church, his head hung heavy on his boy’s shoulders, and his eyes darkened, and I began to feel as if I was following him out of thought, so I had little sense of the time that had passed when he shouted at me, ‘I can’t even begin to work if you keep staring at me!’ He stormed round the desk. He opened a drawer, his back to me, and, saying as loud as he could dare himself, ‘You dumb, rattle-mouthed loogan,’ he retrieved a magazine and threw it at my head. ‘There,’ he said. ‘If you need something to keep you occupied, there’s that.’ And he took to his typewriter again.

  *

  The magazine was another Astonishing edition. The cover for this one had a small green alien boarding a streetcar: he wore a big glass bulb of a space helmet and he was having to stand on the tips of his spaceboots to pay the driver for the ride. No one in the city seemed surprised by his small greenness, his spaceboots, space helmet, his big eyes or balloon of a head. The driver was delighted to have him on board.

  I flicked through, and near the back I found a story with Holcomb’s name attached to it. It was shorter than his Traveller in Time and had nothing to do with the alien on the cover.

  Holcomb himself was beginning to peck a hesitant drumbeat out of his typewriter.

  I read the story about the streetcar-riding alien. It was about friendly little green men landing on earth and taking up as tourists. The earthlings are shocked at first, but we grow accustomed, and everyone’s happy to have them because they pay their way and they don’t get under anyone’s feet.

  Only then they start getting interested in strange shows. A group of these aliens go and watch them give a guy the chair. They take pictures during and clap politely once they’ve done burning him. Then they start crowding round whenever there’s a car accident. And soon this is all they’re interested in. Suicides jumping from windows, knife fights outside gin joints, mishaps on building sites: interested crowds of little green aliens gather round like it’s a peepshow.

  Then a group of big shots—the chief of police
, the mayor, some captains of industry—are all gathered together, talking this through in an office high over a city where fires burn. They start saying how maybe there are more car crashes than there used to be, and more suicides and more knife fights too. Isn’t that quite the thing? Only just as they start to get a hold on the corners of this thought they get sour with each other and an argument breaks out. One of them starts bitching to himself about his lousy family while he knocks back whisky and gives the ground the evil eye, the rest poke each other in the chest and raise their voices. They start throwing fists. The chief of police pounds a captain of industry to pieces on the corner of his desk. The mayor grabs an official mayoral letter opener and slices his own secretary through the stomach, then takes one in the chest from a revolver that another captain of industry has pulled out of his sock. The unhappy family man breaks his bottle and uses it to tear out his own wrists, then finishes the job by throwing himself through the window. And outside there’s a floating group of little green men, taking pictures and clapping.

  It was a pretty good one.

  *

  Holcomb kept pecking away and no one arrived with the intention of pulling his throat out, so I kept reading—about an asylum for lunatics and a strange experiment, and more aliens, and cosmic rays that made the whole planet brainy for a single year. Eventually I got to Holcomb’s story. ‘A Strange Kind of Suicide’ it was called. It was shorter than his other, the one about the creatures, but not as short as it could have been. There were maybe two bits in the whole story that you needed, the rest was dead weight.