Muscle

by Alan Trotter

  *

  But outside, standing beneath a tree on his rubber hoof, taking the air, was Childs, Swagger’s gunsel.

  The smart play would have been to spin on our heels and head off in the other direction, until we’d put enough distance between ourselves and the place of certain recent threatening behaviour, until everything started looking a bit hazier and more subjective. This was the sound legal counsel. But we were bruised and sore and it seemed like a pleasure to give Swagger the straight goods on whether a cripple was enough to hold us tight, so we headed straight for Childs.

  _____ snarled at him a little and pulled out the butterfly knife again. He said, ‘Tell your elbow that the next time I’ll see him coming, and when I do I’m going to knock his beak through the roof of his hat.’

  Childs didn’t step back from the knife, or pull out his brass knuckles, but he looked over his shoulder, with its empty flap of sleeve, and there was Swagger, walking toward us, closer than hell, close as sweat to skin, and _____ reared like a startled horse but then widened his shoulders and seemed ready to jump on the detective, to clamber up him, like a man swinging his way up the side of a building to punch through the windows.

  Swagger held up big peaceful paws. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘that scene up there was no damn good. And I hope you boys know I realise that. But we’re none of us green. We all know how the game is played. And I tried to make the set-up clear, to sit down and talk you into this situation properly before you marched over here. You wouldn’t hear it then.’

  The detective paused. _____ still bristled, but Swagger was at his ease. There was nothing defensive in the way he held up one hand as he spoke. There was no sign that he was expecting a lunge from _____, which was something you wanted to be ready for if it was coming.

  ‘I want things to be jake between us,’ Swagger said. ‘I can appreciate good workmanship wherever I see it, and the way you were putting the fright into that frail up there, that was something special. You do good work: I knew that the moment I saw you, back when I had to lift Polk out of your card game, and I’m not going to make it my business to hurt your business.’

  By now _____ was looking at the gumshoe with something more like curiosity than spite. His butterfly knife hung limp like a spoon in the hand of a kid who’s finished a sundae.

  ‘Listen,’ said Swagger, ‘the last thing I want to do is get in a position where I have to go toe-to-toe with a couple of tough loogans such as yourselves. I got through it once, by the skin of my teeth’s skin, but that doesn’t make me keen to go up against you again. So how about we go and I buy us all a drink and we can have a talk and I can set things jake between us?’

  Once, back when he had a working neck, a lot more teeth and one less hole in his head, I’d watched Holcomb on a bad streak at a poker game, losing money at each hand and just tilting harder after it on the next. When he’d lost all he had to lose and as much as the rest of the table was willing to take from him in promises, he’d sat back in his chair with a smile on his face that said that if nothing else he was at least drunk. Then he started talking about ‘people’, which was how he often talked about himself, and about how they’d sometimes get the feeling that they didn’t know why they made the decisions they made or acted the way they acted: like the real business of everything being felt by them was actually being conducted somewhere far away.

  I thought that made some sense, that it was a notion people probably got a lot more than they admitted.

  At any rate, we agreed to the drink.

  *

  ‘There’s not many,’ said Swagger, ‘could ask for a glass of water in this place and walk out intact.’ He laughed and clapped me hard across the shoulders. We made for a table. The man sitting at it had memorable ears, ears like a mudslide: I’d seen him box once. When he saw the big shamus carrying a mess of drinks toward him he cleared out, wiping his seat down with his cap before he left. He had somewhere else to be. We took our seats and Swagger pushed a whisky into _____’s hand, and raised his own in a toast. ‘To bygones!’ he said and knocked it back. _____ sipped suspiciously. The cripple and I watched.

  ‘I meant every word I said back there, boys, I hope you know that. Damn fine work. And I don’t begrudge you putting the scare on Evelyn Heydt, and I hope you don’t begrudge me doing my job either.’ He took a gulp of beer and wiped the foam from his lip with the cuff of his shirt. I drank some of my water. Without taking his wary eyes off Swagger, _____ had finished his whisky and started on a beer.

  *

  If _____ had ever cared what had brought Swagger to Evelyn Heydt’s door then by the time he was four drinks in the curiosity had left him. He seemed content to drink and listen to Swagger’s stories. Swagger had moved from telling us how much he hoped we understood to talking about the war. Swagger had seen things in the war.

  ‘I once saw a man dying on the ground, his wife—his goddamned beautiful young wife—and his three young kids gathered round him weeping, the ground muddy and red from his blood and their tears. It was goddamned tragic,’ Swagger said. ‘Enough to make a weak man cry. I’d shot him. You got to do things like that in the war, and no one asking to see a licence or taking statements about whether their back was turned or if they were armed. Tragic, of course, but necessary. I blew a hole in his chest the kids could have crawled up in. Childs was there.’ He gestured to the cripple who was turning his finger round the rim of his glass of beer and watching Swagger talk. We were all watching him talk, but not, you got the idea, the same way Childs was. ‘He took a bullet for me that day. Caught it beneath the shoulder. It cost him that arm. The only friend I’ve ever had worth a damn, and the only man I’d trust when the lead’s set to fly. He saved my life when he caught that bullet. I got my revenge though. Burned that whole damn village to the ground. I must have killed thirty of the bastards that day. I probably got the one that did that to him, we guess.’ Swagger finished his beer and broke the back of another one. Then he raised it to the cripple, who looked on like a taxidermied hound, glass eyes raised admiringly. ‘The best man I know,’ he said, ‘and they took his arm, the sons of bitches!’ And he flung the glass of beer into the wall. _____ had been keeping pace, had been loosened by his whiskies and beers—he grabbed my glass of water from the table and flung it after Swagger’s beer. ‘SONS OF BITCHES,’ he screamed, and went back to his own drink.

  ‘You boys ever speak to your writer friend, Holcomb, about himself before he came to the city? The sort of people he knew?’ Swagger asked. ‘Back when he could still speak, of course.’

  ‘Sounds like a good war,’ said _____.

  ‘It was a hell of a war,’ said Swagger wistfully. ‘You ever been to war, Box? You look like you could be some use in a war.’ I had nothing to say to that, but it didn’t matter because he carried on talking. ‘Evelyn Heydt,’ he said. ‘I understand that she owes some money.’

  _____ didn’t say anything.

  ‘Well let’s say she does, just for talking. That’s not a thing that concerns us. Let’s say she caught it off Holcomb. I know women who’ve caught worse things off me in the past.’ He grinned at Childs and got a dutiful smirk back. ‘And let’s further say that Holcomb isn’t in much of a condition to be earning a wage as anything but paste right now. That also doesn’t concern us. Hell, could be he deserved it—I know plenty that do. There’s not enough rods in this city for all the shooting it would take to clean it up. Heydt, Holcomb. None of that matters to us. I’m just interested in you boys. You boys do damn fine work.’ His drink tipped back. ‘Hell, I’m getting us another,’ he said. _____ went with him. I was left with Childs staring at me.

  Now he leaned across, pushing the stump of his shoulder into me, his breath itching my face.

  He said, ‘If you know what’s good for you, you won’t get involved.’ He kept his voice low and his eyes on me. I thought that the way his stump was, we must have looked like a magic trick, like he’d pushed an arm clean through me.

  ‘But th
en,’ he said, ‘what are you saving yourself for?’ He looked at me, but not like he was expecting anything, and then went back to circling the top of his glass with a finger.

  Swagger and _____ came back carrying drinks, and Childs sat back in his chair. They hadn’t brought me any water.

  *

  They filled and overfilled and refilled themselves with drinks. Swagger was telling another war story. About a time Childs had dived on top of a grenade. ‘He saved my goddamn life. That grenade blew both of his kidneys clean out of him,’ he was saying. ‘He still doesn’t piss right. The best friend I have in the word. In the world. You boys are freelance, correct? I mean I know you do most of your work for … Danskin? Or …?’ He looked at _____ inquisitively, but he might as well have asked the faces in his billfold.

  ‘The point is you do good work,’ Swagger said. He’d been saying it all night. ‘And maybe you’re interested in being hired to do some more. We had a strange visitor to our office recently. Death himself, or at least, that’s how he looked. As tall as Box here, but thin as a whip, and a face from a horror flick. I’m lucky I’ve got a hell of a tough secretary, because most would have fled or expired at the sight of him. He claimed to have known of Holcomb in a previous life. Previous to the one that’s just been wrung out of him, I mean.’

  He looked at us hard. _____ was listing back and forth in his seat—it was hard to know what he was hearing, whether it was Swagger or just the noises of the drunk sea he drifted on alone.

  ‘Anyway,’ Swagger said, ‘this tall figure with the death’s head, he set us on a piece of work, and I’d say we could use help.’ He pulled out a business card and slid it face down across the table to _____. ‘That’s my address. If you’re interested stop by some time tomorrow. Call before you do. Marly, a real doll—she’ll take a message if I’m out. Might even be more interesting than breaking hands and fanning dead writers,’ he said cheerfully and slapped _____ on the shoulder.

  _____ had picked up the card and looked it over, and he tucked it into his pocket with a nod.

  *

  They drank until they could barely stand and Swagger’s stories got caught in time, looping round and round, until _____ was howling and roaring more and more while they looped like it was a ride at the fairground, and Childs eyed me and nursed his beer, and I drank my water and wondered what it was all about.

  Interlude

  His yell as they throw him from the train still fails to compel itself on their minds. He tumbles between the tracks and, quicker even than the first, is out of sight.

  Hector rattles the railing the man has just journeyed over. He tries to kick the rust from the barrier, the anger from his body. He wants to get off the train, but there’s no way off, only the same hard way that two men have already taken, not for another fifty minutes or more, until they reach the city. He screams abuse at the night.

  Charles smiles and enjoys his cigarette—Hector’s frustration is another familiar external roar, like the roar of the train’s engine, and it is making him feel calmer. Hector kicks and rattles at the railing. He throws his hat at the ground and shouts at Charles, screams directly up into his smile and the exhaust from his cigarette, ‘You big incompetent lug, you colossal stupid try-hard sa—’ but he is interrupted by the hat, which skitters towards the back of the train, aiming for its own death plunge, flapping into the bars of the railing, and Hector skitters after it, making Charles roar now, with laughter. Hector pulls the hat down firmly onto his head and looks at him.

  ‘Christ, what is there to be sour about?’ asks Charles.

  ‘You expect so little from the world,’ says Hector, ‘because you engage with it on a desultory level. You have no teeth, no hooks, no grip, so when life provides disappointments, you are content. You’re an insect so unburdened by any weight of thought that it can move on top of water and live on drifting scum. Yes, I’m sour. I’m sour at him’—he points back—‘because we gave him every chance and he provided us with so little.’

  ‘And so then what? It’s done, it’s passed,’ says Charles. ‘The man’s gone. In the sense that we threw him clean from existence, and in the just as absolute sense that he’s already miles back, and we have to continue forward.’

  ‘Continue forward for what?’

  Charles taps Hector on the left breast pocket, where there is a letter from a woman Hector met at her wedding, though he doesn’t remember her, who now has a man that she wants killed. ‘Besides,’ says Charles, ‘the impulse is hardly exhausted. As an experiment, he was disappointing, of course, but there are other ways to proceed.’

  *

  Hector wants to get the job done with and over, Charles wants to have a good night’s rest after the journey, and in the morning make their trip to the nuthouse. But mainly he wants to go and get tight, so they go into a bar across from the train station and set about getting tight.

  ‘There’s never been a job with less urgency to it,’ Charles says, which is true, and Hector is only a little sore at being made to waste time.

  They order food and sit beside a window to eat it. As they’re finishing their meal, a prowl car making a turn mounts the sidewalk next to them. They can see the two policemen inside: the one in the passenger seat presses his arm against the roof of the car to steady himself as it drops off the curb again. It comes to a stop in front of the train station. They watch the policemen go inside.

  ‘So,’ says Charles, ‘what did we think of the two performances on the train?’

  ‘We said already,’ says Hector. ‘They gave it their all, or we gave it their all, but the result was unspectacular.’

  ‘There was no charge to it. We can mope about that, we can say that these were unremarkable men, gave unremarkable performances and perished, but then what? In that situation, whose is the lack of commitment?’

  ‘They gave it their all,’ says Hector.

  ‘They gave it their all,’ says Charles, ‘so don’t we owe it to them to continue to think this through?’

  ‘I’m unmoved by the suggestion that we owe them anything,’ says Hector and gives a squeak of a belch.

  Charles proceeds, keeping irritation, with some effort, to the outside edge of his voice. ‘We don’t owe them anything, but to leave things as they are is to cement our disappointment. If we can accept the little they provided it becomes all that we deserve. Or.’

  ‘Or?’

  ‘Or what succeeds them might still justify their performances,’ says Charles.

  ‘You have a suggestion,’ says Hector.

  ‘I have a suggestion,’ says Charles. ‘Compel the next one to create a persona. The last gave us his own story and it was nothing.’

  ‘Trite.’

  ‘Trite, uninteresting, unmemorable. There was no charge. Let’s say that the next is called—’

  ‘Earl,’ suggests Hector.

  ‘Earl. But we sit him down and make him tell us he’s called—’

  ‘Douglas.’

  ‘Douglas. And he’s employed as a gas station attendant, but we make him tell us he’s a—’

  ‘Plumber.’

  ‘Whatever you want,’ says Charles. ‘The thing would be to get an account of the life, as we did from’—he’s lighted a new cigarette and he points it in the direction of the prowl car and the station—‘Ed back there. Except that this life will not at all resemble the actual lived experience. It would be a fiction, a deceit. Now would that make us feel any differently about Douglas’s subsequent victimhood than we do about Ed’s?’

  ‘It might,’ shrugs Hector.

  ‘Might it even illuminate how we feel about Ed’s victimhood? Might we re-conceive the loss to his two children of a caregiver and model for male adulthood, the loss to Charlotte of a lover, to his employer of an obviously intelligent, committed man? We would have more information about our response to the factual account by having had another response to a fraud.’

  ‘The man’s name,’ says Hector, ‘wasn’t Ed, whatever it was,
and the other details are just as wrong.’

  Charles grinds his teeth. ‘I don’t know why you’re pretending to be too dense to take my point. It allows us to proceed to a new experience in a way that might also go some way to redeeming the old.’

  ‘I suppose it might colour things,’ says Hector.

  PART 4

  ‘Mike Swagger, Private Detective’ was painted on the glass of the door. Childs’ name didn’t appear.

  We went in to a small anteroom, where a woman who must have been Marly sat behind her desk smiling sweetly. We took our hats off. _____ coughed into his hand and then used it to press down his hair. We walked over to her. She smiled. ‘Mike told me all about you both. Thank you so much for coming in.’

  She spoke sweet and low, a sashay of a voice. There are those who say they’ve heard the voice of God, and I’ve never wondered what that would be like, but it occurred to me that there was nothing God could say that Marly’s voice couldn’t keep him in bed an hour longer.

  ‘Please go on. Mike won’t be busy for long.’

  _____ opened the door through to the inner office and inside Swagger was sitting at his desk, in conversation with a man, standing, who twitched nervously at our entrance—who looked like he twitched nervously at everything. Swagger gestured for us to sit in some green leather padded chairs by the door and we sat and waited, our hats in our laps.

  ‘Yes, it’s a little jail time, Terrence,’ Swagger was saying, ‘but that’s still a hell of a deal for you. We both know with a bit more sniffing around they could light you up like a firework, so why not make this easy for all of us and take the time? Sit it out. You’ve done it before, told me you taught yourself some Spanish when you were in. How’s your Spanish now, Terrence?’

  ‘I’m not going to jail!’ Terrence screeched back. He had the stringy build of a snow fiend, his shirt was untucked, and from the back of his pants stuck a revolver that looked like it weighed twice what he did. Now he grabbed it and started waving it about, though it was shy about pointing directly at Swagger. I looked over at _____ and he shrugged. We sat and watched. ‘I’m not going to no jail! You hear me, you flatfoot? I’m not going to jail over this.’ The gun was shaking in his hand like he was already rattling at his bars. Swagger sighed, slid open a drawer and lifted out his own gun. He placed it on the desk, but kept one hand on it.