Instead of looking through the boxes individually, he just stepped on them, hoping to feel cash through his boot. An overwhelming rage took him over after he tried to stomp a frozen salmon fillet and he fell, firing the fish across the floor. He scrambled across the ground, falling in place next to the fat woman, pointing the gun for the first time at her head.
“I can see the line of your neck move with blood and your eyes look three-quarters full of water and it kind of makes me want to crush you to death with a rock. No disrespect. No disrespect, just, just that’s how I feel is all.” She was swallowing at the kind of weird jerky pace that people about to tweak right off this earth did sometimes, and he knew he had to calm her down. “It’s okay. It’s okay. It’s so okay you don’t know it.” He slumped back and rested his back against the kitchen cabinet, waved the gun around like he imagined a professor talking about the environment would, and forgot to speak out loud. He looked at his wing, and he smiled like boxers do when they’re cut and they can’t feel it yet. He fell into a long, brutal cough. Blood splattered out of his mouth, catching her in the face. She spazzed to the side like it was buckshot.
“You think I’m greedy but I’m not.” Sometimes the things that run down your face could be blood or tears or both, and you can’t tell. “It’s not greed, is what I’m saying.
“My high school girlfriend, greasy little slut named Taryn, greasy fuckin’ little whore, lovely cheek hairs on her. Like, denser cheek hair than you might think was sexy on a girl, but I liked it. You can like almost anything if you’re right up close to it and smelling it and all that. And she was good to go, right? The last time I saw her, I’d just fucked her and we were getting post-fucky and all that little boygirl shit like that there. And she’s lying on the pillow, talking about moving out of town, being gone, talking about being gone. And she did an impression of a kite, right? Leaned over and kissed me, and then pulled her head up and away, like a gust of wind came, picked it up.” Glass Jar had started crying a while ago. “And it was a good impression, a really good impression. But she forgot the grass and the string and the running and the sun and the flying and the wind, and that tug in your hand. The tug of something weighing nothing. Do you get it? Those are all the good parts of kites.” She was just staring at one spot. Glass Jar smiled benevolently, went to touch her cheek, and she moved away. For the first time in a while, he smelled the piss. Glass Jar patted her leg. “It’s okay. I’ll just go look now. I’ll just look myself.”
For a little while, the house settled into a calm, buzzy place for Glass Jar. He gathered himself enough to close the front door. His system of searching consisted of violently throwing the large objects around and slowly sorting and finicking with smaller objects. He made a large, pretty pile of different-coloured coffee mugs.
Glass Jar would never have thought to look in the piano bench, for a number of very good reasons. The first was that he did not actually know what a piano bench was; the second was that even if he had known, there was no piano in the house; the third was that, all pianos aside, the idea of a seat opening itself up was too much for the lead-legged vertical leap of Glass Jar’s imagination to even allow him to graze with the end of a fingernail. So it was fortunate for him that the bench had popped open when he’d tossed it against the fireplace, and even more fortunate that he’d happened to spot it while spinning around in a circle and casting a wild eye over the room.
Glass Jar dug his hands into the fireplace, ashes floating into his face and eyes, attaching themselves weightlessly to the sticky surfaces of dried blood and tears and snot. He picked up the three red packets of money and almost instantly began crying again. Hard, heaving sobs that racked his body from his weak, febrile chest down to his rancid, fungal feet.
He wanted water so badly.
Grace began crawling towards her bedroom, and Glass Jar spun around firing, blowing three holes into the ceiling between the living room and kitchen.
“I will kill your arms and legs! I will splinter your bones if you move them again.”
She went flat and stiff. Glass Jar sprawled to his feet, ran towards her and took her cheeks in his hands, roughly torquing her eyes to touch his eyes. He’d intended to ask her for the rest of the money, but once he got there he forgot about it.
Glass Jar screamed into her face about ravens and magpies and ice and darkness and grass and gin and ice and darkness and tonsils and ice and darkness and the way your fingertips feel after you’ve just picked flowers.
The idea of flowers, the image of grabbing one forming in his mind, caused Glass Jar to curl the fingers of his right hand tight, squeezing one shot off into the ceiling. A thin spurt of blood exploded out her ear, and she rolled out of his hands to the ground, screaming into the tiles. Glass Jar let himself reel back a little, lost his balance, and slammed his head into the door frame. He spun around, and as the room shrank down to the soundless space of his vision, he drifted over to the money, grabbed it, and walked into the darkness towards his truck, which was splayed sideways across the driveway. It felt like there was a tiny, beautiful pillow under each of his feet, moving with him as he walked.
36
The list of things that could make Mousey feel sad in a weak and authentic way, rather than an amused-quickly-turning-to-vicious way, had been steadily whittled down over the years. It’s never worth tallying up these sorts of lists, subjective as they are; what’s important is really just the losing. The slow paring down of possibilities. Two of the few that remained were: being abandoned by a friend, and too much red meat. Mousey’d had plenty of both for the night.
He was far from drunk, but he did have a pretty solid rear-wheel skid of a buzz on. The sense of a deeper intoxication than he was feeling, held back by the heavy meal draped across the bottom of his belly. Finally admitting that Grace wasn’t going to show up, Mousey fished some money out of his pocket, briefly considered jumping the fence of the patio, then changed his mind and took the long way back through the bar.
Inside, the HBI was full and buzzing. Some surprisingly talented old men were playing blues at the front; the pool table and darts (slightly to his disappointment) were both in use. It didn’t take much looking for Mousey to spot the young woman from the chess board.
She’d seemed so calm when he’d met her, cool, but she’d had a lot more to drink now. Looked like she was stretched a bit thin. She was randomly surveying the room, one arm loosely draped across the bar to protect her empty glass, peering disdainfully at every other person around. Mousey stopped walking, started waving with both hands. Her drunk scanning was pretty much random, so it took her an awkwardly long time to spot him. He kept the hands waving, thinking that her flush drunkface looked a little warmer, a little more receptive and like a person who might cuddle, than she’d looked outside the other day. When she saw him, she popped her head up, covered one eye with her hand.
“Chessdude! What’s up? Come and sit down. Or sit down and come, it’s a free country!”
Mousey ambled over and plunked down on the stool next to her. He tipped a hat that didn’t exist. “My name’s Alan. People call me Mousey.”
She did not touch any imaginary clothing. “Mousey. Jesus, what is up with people on this island and the novelty names. My name’s normal. Greta. Starts with a g, ends with an a, normal, everyday stuff. See, that was a show of trust right there, the real name I just gave you. I’ll make you a deal.”
“Already we’re making deals. I’m just here to relax.”
“By relax you mean get stood up? Haw haw. I saw you outside earlier.”
“I missed you coming in.”
“You were occupied, looking like your mom was too busy getting furtively drilled by her office manager to pick you up at the soccer field. You tell the coach that it’s okay and he can leave, your little head poppin’ up every time a green Chrysler minivan drives past . . . which they pretty much always do.”
“We just walked home when I was a kid. Nobody played soccer either.”<
br />
Greta wobbled slightly away from him. “You’re old.”
Mousey grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her up to sit steady. “You can’t prove that.”
She shook her hand free, then she ran the hand through her hair. “Let me tell you one thing, bro. One thing. We played floaty chess. We did that thing. So you can stay and hang out with me, but we have to skip the get-to-know-yous. I’m saying we played floaty chess. That’s a bond tighter than knowing where you’re from. I’m saying you can stay, but you’ve gotta interest me a little. Do some being interesting at me.”
“Sure. Goes like this. This is how it goes.”
“Ooooh. Tell me how it goes. Old-ass men telling me how it goes, that’s a thing I don’t get enough of in my normal life.”
Mousey winked and carried on. “I was under a tree, this was a while ago, beautiful day, breezy and sunny. Sky all blue and shit. I was standing for a long time in one spot under this tree, and it was windy, and the wind was blowing yesterday’s rain off the branches, and for a couple minutes I was sure it was raining only on me. I could have sworn I was standing under the only rain cloud in the world.”
“I bet you used to be really observant. You’re dull now. That’s what I’m saying. A dullard, if dullards are a word or a thing. A thing a word talks about.”
“Good. I like dull, I’ll take it.”
“Was that supposed to imply that you’re actually super-exciting? Like you’re so exciting you like to be called boring? Because that’s subtle.”
“Hey.” He spread his arms wide in a way that should have seemed like something a fun and outgoing person would do just because they were fun and outgoing. “I’m a salesman. It’s what we do, imply shit.”
“You’re a salesman?”
“I was.”
“Of what?”
“Garage-door openers.”
“People sell those? I thought they were just a thing at hard-ware stores.”
“Jesus, you’re young. Your skin looks like it feels like the top of a milk pudding.”
“What’s a milk pudding?”
“Jesus.” Mousey motioned for two drinks, peeled a twenty out and left it on the counter in front of him, and turned to face her again. “You’re young.”
“Repeating yourself ain’t makin’ ya less dull, gramps.”
“You’re too young to say ain’t.”
“I’m not young.”
He took an awkwardly long enough pause that the drinks had time to get there in the middle of it. “Well.” Mousey smiled the bartender away and nudged one of the drinks towards her. “That’s about the most youthful thing I’ve heard a body say.”
“If you want me to finish this drink anywhere near you, you need to tell me one exciting thing that’s happened to you, ever.”
“Ever, huh?”
“Ever ever ever ever.”
“So, like, if I shot a pimp in the knee one time?”
“So, like, if you did, yeah.”
“Oh. I didn’t. But I did get in a fight the other day.”
“You did?”
“Yeah, first one in a while. I was running, keeping in shape, obviously,” he patted his stomach with both hands, “and I almost got mugged at knife point.” He said knife with an audible k.
In sharper times, Mousey might have noticed her eyes dart quickly at him and then back to her drink. “At Knife Point? I didn’t even know that was a place.”
“It’s more of a state of mind.”
“Where was the real place?”
“Ever been to Morte Lake?
“No.”
“Yeah, so at that place you’ve never been. It happened, for real.”
“I believe you.” He might have seen how suddenly and quickly she was bringing herself to focus, might have read the name fixing itself in her mind. “What happened?”
“I was running on the hiking trail, and a young man came up with a knife,” he said it without the hard k this time, already a bit embarrassed to be this deep into it. “And he asked me for my shit.”
“Did you give it to him?”
“Nope, I, uh, tuned him up a bit with a nearby stick, took the knife off him. Then we talked it over and went swimming. I gave him his blade back. We had a good time.”
“At Morte Lake.”
“At Morte Lake.”
“On the hiking trail.”
“On the hiking trail.”
“What happened after?”
“I bought him a tent and some hard cider. We didn’t hug, but we looked at each other’s chests and hugging came to mind.”
Greta nodded, cocked a finger-gun towards him. “You said you were what? A garage-door salesman?”
“Something like that, yeah.”
The thumb-hammer fired, then she let her hand drop to the side and the whole thing was just fingers again. She let her head hang back, let that neck expose itself a while. Her long, lined throat bobbed with the words: “I’m drunk.”
“That’s not good strategy. Announcing it like that.”
“There’s different kinds of strategy. There’s defensive short-term strategies — for example, a person with apparently desirable holes announcing her drunkenness in a bar. But then there’s longer-range, equity-based decision making, wherein one must factor in and show awareness of a greater quantity of complex variables. For instance, keeping in mind the paradox of being a straight man in this century, if one is, in fact, living in this century, that showing an awareness of, or merely a vague, implied sensitivity about, rape culture to a drunk-announcing woman in a bar actually sort of makes one seem like one is a wee bit of a rapist that should be factored into one’s approach to the aforementioned drunk-announcing hole-haver.” She straightened suddenly and placed a hand on her upper chest, as if hoping to hold the burp down with her hand. “I think I might have gotten lost halfway through that sentence. You get the idea. I gave it to you.”
“Honey, I’ve been approaching drunk-announcing hole-havers since you were just a thought in your father’s nutsack.”
Greta looked up at him impassively. “Leaning into it, as a macro-strategy, not so bad. Mentioning my dad’s balls is questionable.”
Mousey slapped her heartily on the back. “Well, kiddo, since you seem to find me about as appealing as a sensitive toddler finds three dead rabbits stacked on top of each other, we might as well have some yuks.”
“That was an oddly detailed image.”
From looking at her eyes, Mousey could tell he looked blurry. He’d looked blurry plenty.
They went back and forth, throwing bits at each other as Greta drank water and Mousey drank cider, trying to catch up. Eventually, they decided they were even and each ordered a double gin and tonic. Mousey took a deep slurp and grinned into the citrus pucker.
“So whyya here?”
Greta rolled her left eye over her nose and just let her right drift a bit to look at him. “A vacation.”
Mousey nodded and considered his drink for a second. Then he dipped his fingers in the empty glass he had left over and flicked a good slop of watery gin at Greta. She recoiled and slammed a bony, muscle-deadening fist into his arm. Turned the knuckles over and everything.
“Ow. Good slug. So you’re on one of those twenty-six-year-old-woman solo vacations? That’s what you’re doing here?”
Greta sluggishly let her chin droop down to her collarbones, then she rolled her head back around and spoke to the ceiling, her long, lined throat bobbing with the words. “Twenty-six? Oh gee, thanks, Mr. Subtle Creeps.”
“Always guess low, as my uncle, Dr. Lecherous Overture, taught me.”
“Haw haw.” She said the laugh like it was two words each filled with lead. “But to answer your suspicion, I’m not on vacation. I came for work, writing my thesis. Need some alone time.”
“That explains the weeknight drunk.”
“Haw haw haw. Because academics drink a lot, I get it.”
“What’s your thesis about?”
/> “Hieronymus Bosch, the greatest religious painter of the Renaissance, and the forever king of the triptych.”
“Follow-up question.”
“Shoot.”
“What’s an academic?”
Greta made an actual laughing sound, swivelled in her stool, and closed one eye thickly, looking him over. “You’re a little bit less dumb than I thought you were.”
“Right back under ya.”
She tilted her head to the side.
“Instead of right back at you.”
“Who says ‘right back at you’? Are you selling me a used car in the early eighties?”
“What do you know about the early eighties?”
“Bitch, please. I’m an historian.”
“You’re not curious about garage-door openers? Sales? I asked you about your triplitch thing.”
“Dude, no. I’m a little curious how you came to be beating muggers up and buying them tents. Like, what life led to that? But I’m not curious enough to ask.”
“You’re not curious enough to ask directly.” They passed each other a smile that wasn’t really a smile. Mousey lurched regrettably towards her. He clapped a hold of the young woman’s leg just above the knee. “I can answer that question. Just not in public.”
Greta cocked an eyebrow at him like he was the random sexist subplot in an otherwise decent romantic comedy. Something caught her eye and she reached out and snatched his hand, dragging it into the light. “Can I bite your fingernails?”
“Bite your own.”
She dropped his hand and raised her own, twirling her fingers sadly. “They’re gone. I spit them out on the ground or else they might be in my belly, I’m not sure how it works with fingernails if you accidentally swallow a couple while you’re driving. If they’re like hairballs or not. Probs you just pass them.”
MARRY, BANG, KILL Page 17
