Mousey was more likely to use the word awkward to describe a fall or a running gait than a social interaction. This was a little bit because of his age and a big bit because awkwardness was too weak a concept to describe the kinds of silences he had sat in so many times, in so many cars.
It’s not awkward when you and a beautiful singer whose perfectly tuned eardrum has just been shattered can’t find the next thing to say to each other. And it’s not awkward when your only real friend within 2,300 miles thinks you almost got her killed, and you can’t correct her. Those are both whole other things. Two more things too horrible and too common to have picked up a name.
“This the part where I make a joke about turning on the radio. My radio doesn’t work, though.”
Grace’s hand was fastened to her ear, still. “No, Mouse, this is the part where you shut the fuck up and give me a ride in your car and I hold what’s left of my ear to my head and try to forget about your crackhead drug dealer who punched me in my belly to steal shitty, dirty money that I didn’t want and that wasn’t even mine and that I didn’t even need to know existed. No. This isn’t the part where you make any joke to me. This isn’t a part where you anything about anything.”
They missed the ferry by less than two minutes, which meant they had about fifty-eight minutes to wait for the next one. After Mousey parked in the overflow lot, Grace stayed sitting and holding her ear and clenching her other hand in a fist so tight her palm probably wasn’t even sweaty. It took Mousey way, way too long to ask.
“Would you like a hand out of the car?”
Grace laughed just a little bit. “I don’t know if I’d like it. But I do need it.”
Mousey helped her by grabbing her hand and guiding her by the other elbow, which was still bent to help grasp the ear. Not having the purchase, and feeling about six different kinds of shaky, he dropped half her weight at the worst possible time, and her knee buckled and she fell flat to the pavement.
She kept her hand clenched post-trauma-tight over the ear, but as he helped her up, he saw three dark red drops of blood escape, dribbling down her shirt in long, stretched-out drops, each of them spreading out into nothing before any blood hit the pavement, like a waterfall so high it’s nothing but a mist by the time it reaches the bottom.
They stayed away from the walk-on waiting area, worried that staff would ask questions. Grace sat on a concrete barrier and Mousey paced in a way that he could tell was impossibly annoying. A half dozen sailboats bobbed in tiny, tethered rhythms a few feet away.
Mousey let almost the whole hour pass before he tried again. “Okay, sorry, but practical thing: I have to get back to Tommy, but you’ve got cab fare?”
Grace didn’t look up from her feet. “I have my wallet.”
Mousey stilled himself and spoke a bit louder than he’d intended. “Listen, a lot got really fucked up and I’m not, not even going to apologize, because I can’t. But I want to tell you that you mean . . .”
Grace finally looked at him, and it was not a good look. “Don’t you try to tell me anything about what I mean to anyone, least of all you. Even past whatever the fuck just happened, you are trash. Serious trash. You’re a white cop who shot poor black kids and ended up with a beautiful house in the Gulf Islands, that’s who you are.”
In sharper times, Mousey might have been able to hold his temper around someone he cared for very much and whose life and well-being he’d accidentally altered in the last few hours and who was right this second bleeding from a precious organ. “It was one, all right? And he sure as shit wasn’t a kid. He was a three-hundred-pound pimp who was strangling me to death.” Mousey pulled his lips back into a sneer he knew was far uglier than he’d be comfortable seeing in the mirror. “Anything else you say, I’m probably that thing, but I’m not some dumb, racist cop. I’m just not. That’s . . . that’s about the only thing I’ll stand up for.”
“Mooo-thurr-fucker. Who says you know what you are? You’re the last person. I’m a singer who just had my fucking eardrum blown out. I can barely even hear you, and when I do it hurts. And you’re still talking. You have no idea what the fuck you are, and you sure as shit don’t get to tell me. It doesn’t matter what’s in your heart. Nobody cares how you feel. You’re a white man living in a glass house on a Gulf Island who fucked over a city full of poor people to get there. Maybe you don’t think dumb, racist thoughts to yourself. Sure. Good for you. But, at a certain point, it really doesn’t matter how you feel. Because you are what you are, and everywhere you go, people get hurt. You don’t think I realize that crazy asshole who did this to me was your drug dealer? Dealt you your pocket-rattling little pills that you’re whacked out on three-quarters of the time? You don’t think I know that? You think you’re the only one thinking, looking around. Everyone does that. That’s what being a person is. You like to talk, so you rambled about giving the cash away, and your maniac drug dealer listened and came to my house and fucked me up, really bad. That’s what happened.”
When it was time, Mousey could sit and take it. And so he did. This wasn’t a misunderstanding that needed to be corrected, just in case. Just in case Tommy somehow lived, and Grace somehow saw him again, and Tommy somehow kept his mouth shut. Just in case of all of those combined.
Grace started up again, steaming along in full stride. “You think this is my problem with you? Your lazy, reckless shit happening, this time, to blow up on me? That’s not my problem with you, that’s just the shit you took on my dinner plate as a bonus. My problem with you is that you’re a terrible person. You’re a good drunk and a fun guy. That’s all. There’s no feelings here. If we lived in a place big enough to have a mailman, we wouldn’t talk. Because you are everything bad but boring, and even that I’m sure you’ll get quick. I don’t know how you got in with Tom. And he’s, God knows, he’s a grown man who can choose, and he did choose, and that was a long time ago. But, I don’t know how he found you, what you’re doing . . . He thinks you’re helping him, but if anything happens to Tom . . . I will do whatever it takes to fuck you over. Believe it.” She finally let go of her ear, flexed a cramp out of her hand. “All this shit you brought. You tell me you blew up someone’s leg, like that’s a story. A person’s knee. What was it worth to you?”
Mousey didn’t so much cry as leak from one eye and snort a large, solid chunk of mucus down his throat. “What was it worth?” He pulled his shitty gaunt neck even tighter. “What’s a web worth to a spider?”
Grace turned her head all the way away, and Mousey shifted his unfocused eyes to follow, watching the ferry slowly careen, almost sidelong, into the bay.
Grace stood, took two hobbling steps towards the dock, and then turned back. “I’ll thank you for some good times, Mousey. I’ll thank you for the drinks, and I’ll even thank you on spec that you help Tom, and then I’ll say goodbye for fucking ever. That’s it.”
Mousey nodded and whistled three tone-deaf bars of a song from a Sergio Leone movie, the name of which still escaped them both.
41
Greta was a woman of many talents: drawing, cooking, arm knitting, marksmanship, photography, always knowing where the best cheap pho joints and Korean booth-style karaoke places were, close-quarters knife-work, interior decorating, Zumba dancing, and garrote, to name just a few. One talent she’d never possessed, however, was managing her expectations.
As a child, Greta had been exceptionally small and even more exceptionally emotionally sensitive. She often, for example, buried her face in the couch rather than having to speak or make eye contact with her regular babysitter. The problem was not that she was embarrassed but rather that she had developed, in her mind and from books, an ideal of how she wanted to be with other people — what they would think of her, how perfectly they would understand her — and something always went wrong. After however many thousands of tiny disappointments, Greta eventually found herself expecting nothing of people. Taking what was useful, and letting the rest hang. Like basketball, or any spo
rt your hands are too small to play properly: just don’t play. For Greta, to expect even a little was to hope for that thing to be perfect, and even after all the years she’d spent consciously hopeless, and even after all those corpses and all that yoga, all those breaths gathered at heart centre, she’d still get caught wanting sometimes.
As she sat, lazily alert in Tommy’s tent, she began to realize he wasn’t coming, and she began to realize how perfect she’d planned the whole thing to be. Marlo comes back in from buying cigarettes, goes down smooth, practically puts himself, still alive, into the trunk, and she speeds over to Glass Jar’s and finishes him (maybe with a knife, just because), and she makes the ferry, drops off the car and the still-alive mugger in the trunk, then chain-watches Gilmore Girls episodes on Netflix until she falls asleep and wakes up with more money than she thought she’d ever make in a year in a Cayman bank account. The exact perfect way it could happen.
The longer she sat, the more palpably she felt that vision creeping away, and she was forced, once more, to rage silently and adjust to the day as it would really go. Finding the old drunk guy from the bar, maybe having to cut a finger off to get him to give up Marlo, then the kid going down sad and bloody and slow and begging. Greta not even trying to make the ferry; one more night on the road, six too many drinks, one more time.
Greta bought a few feet of plastic sheeting, a staple gun, plastic bags, duct tape, and a litre of bleach. One more time. There was a tall, square, breathing callus behind the counter, and when he rang her goods through, he laughed. “A suspicious person would think you were looking to dispose of a body or two, sweetie.” He had the voice of a seventies rock DJ who’d had his throat run over by a lawnmower.
Greta sneered in the way men always mistake for an embarrassed grin. “A suspicious and a cautious person would think that, be glad it wasn’t his body, and let me walk out of the store.”
The callus laughed uproariously. Greta cracked the ghost of smiles past.
42
Having composed himself a little emotionally and having popped a steadying Percocet and a half and a zooming four Dexedrine, Mousey finally felt ready to sit Tommy down and give him the facts.
Mousey had always been disgusted by the assholes, and there are many, who drop news like it’s theirs to drop, apologizing all over themselves, as if the tragedy is their having to tell the family, not the whole rest of that family being dead or raped or never getting out of jail.
Mousey’s knees cracked worryingly as he sat down, and Tommy didn’t even look up, just kept staring gormlessly at the gaps between the rocks. Mousey reached over and gently pushed the kid’s shoulder, and Marlo didn’t move even a little; instead, he started talking.
“Why did you come here?”
Mousey was there because he wanted to be, because it had become important to him, and because Grace wanted him to be. That and never talk to her again. So Mousey knew the answer to Tommy’s question, but somewhere between being caught off guard and a bit freaked out by Tommy’s new-found twenty-thousand-leagues-under-the-sea stare and his mouth being dry from the Dexies, Mousey flubbed on answering. His tongue covered with spit balled up like pills on a sweater, and his whole mouth tasting like sharp metal covered in bile.
Tommy continued, “I came here because I’d been here before and it’s where my mom lives now.” Tommy wiped the middle of his face with his hand, twisting the skin of his cheeks a little then letting go. “I’ve got a really good throat. That’s what my mom told me once. She told me that when I was twelve, I think, she was, uh, she takes music serious, man. She’s a mean music teacher. She was, anyway, I don’t know what she’s like now. I got a little older, I realized my mom did everything she did because everything I did made her sad. Just sad. That’s it. Anyhow, I did my recital and it was an embarrassment, to her anyway. So we’re talking about it, and I didn’t think I did that bad. I hit all the notes, my voice sounded good. And she looked at me like I was retarded. She’s like, ‘Yeah, if the conservatory ever does a karaoke night, I’ll be sure to bring you.’”
Mousey let the kid stare at the rocks some more, then he started whistling. The kid let him whistle, looked at him sidelong, and even smiled a little. “What I’m saying, Tommy: you’re not a bad singer.”
“Nah, man. She was right. Put the words up, and I can sing along, sound good. Singalong. That’s what I’m good for, following the bouncing ball. Hitting notes isn’t talent, it’s a talent.” Tommy whistled a few bars of a beautiful song. “So, Mousey, is this where you kill me? I’m not that dumb, I can see the ball bouncing.” Tommy nodded limply at the gun in Mousey’s waistband.
Without feeling himself do it, Mousey slapped Tommy hard enough to knock his head to the side, then he reached out with both hands, stopping them before they touched the kid’s face. “Gah. No, no. Sorry, Tommy. Shit on a stick. Sorry.” Mousey took a breath and noticed that he was bouncing his leg manically up and down. He made a buzzy mental note to watch the Dexies. “Okay. No, sir. I’m not killing you. If I was going to, it would have happened already. That’s straight up. Does that make sense to you?”
Marlo nodded, not even looking spacey anymore, looking like actual, empty-forever-and-a-day outer space.
“I have this gun, Tommy, because you’ve got a hit on you, and there’s a hotshot hot-chick hitman here to kill you. That’s why we had to move you from the campground. So what I need you to do is grab me that cash, okay, and the computer. Those are our chips here.”
Tommy nodded his head and puffed his lips, stood and loped to his bag with all the urgency of a bear with a salmon in its mouth walking up to a garbage bin. Mousey put his head in his hands and listened to his bullet-train blood whip around the corners of his eyes.
He waited until what felt like a very long time after Tommy should have found a thing as large and important as $51,000 in cash. Three small black dots appeared on the edge of his vision when he looked up. When he finally did meet Mousey’s gaze, Tommy had already given up and was sitting cross-legged on the ground beside his pulled-out bag.
“Hey, Mousey, remember when we threw out that frying pan? And that tarp.”
Mousey hopped up on one leg and bounced aimlessly a few feet over. He took a giant breath of clean air and cast a suddenly exultant gaze over the midday sky, sitting there wide and hot and open, a window kicked out from the inside. “We tossed away the money.”
“Um, yes. Yeah, I think it was, like, tucked in the tarp when we threw that down in the what’s it . . .”
“Ravine.”
“Yeah, when we rolled all that shit into the ravine and felt good. Yeah, that was the money. Fuck. I’m sorry, man, I was so tired and wired, and . . . Just fuck. Fuck.”
Mousey laughed and doubled over and for some reason got on a jag of saying “hee” over and over through the laughing, which was off-putting and not how he usually laughed.
“Maybe we can go back? Like, I know roughly where it was.”
Mousey gathered himself, stood back up, and waited for the painful, glowing cramp in his abs to ease. “It’s a rainforest, Tommy. That money is mould.”
“Fuck.”
Mousey’s giddiness settled down as he slowly and abstractly became aware of how large and widespread his numb dehydration cramp had become. He bent over slightly and looked up at Tommy. “That about sums it up, yeah.”
“What are we going to do?”
Mousey exhaled through his already thin lips, which he’d pulled tight and bloodless. “That’s the computer?” He was careful to put the hand back in his pocket after they both saw how much it was trembling.
“Yeah. You want to look in it? It’s password-cracked, so you can.”
“Tommy, my man, there’s nothing I’m less curious about in this world than that. No, but that’s our last chip. I’m going to try to get you out of here, but if you get caught, you need that computer.”
“Okay. I’m going to keep it.”
“For real, Tommy. Actually, you
know what, let’s, uh, yeah, I’m going to straight-up duct tape that computer to your chest. I think that’s the right thing to do.”
“Did you bring tape?”
“No.”
“We don’t have tape.”
“Then I’m going to trust you. Please don’t lose that computer.”
“I won’t, man, I won’t. What are we going to do, like now? About the money.”
“We. Us. You and me, Tommy. We’re going to go rob my drug dealer to get you a stake and a boat off the island. Does that make sense to you? Because we need to be clear, and we need to be efficient now. This is it. There’s no pressure, there’s no regret, there’s just things we need to do safely and quickly. If that is clear to you, we’re going to start going over some details about how we’re going to do the things we need to do. So how about it?”
Mousey, on principle, believed in full, honest disclosure in situations like this. But he believed in morality triage in all situations. Tommy was barely hanging on, and telling him it was Glass Jar who’d busted up Grace would be way more than the guy could handle.
Tommy moved his head in a way that convinced Mousey that he was trying to bear down and think about it, his eyes still a bit vacant, posture still slumped and sad and soft. “Wait. So the hitman’s a chick?”
“Yeah, man, she’s a real cutie patootie, too. I accidentally got drunk with her and told her where you were last night. Sorry.”
Marlo nodded and shrugged a bit. “That makes sense.”
“Does it?”
Tommy shrugged again, a little more decisively. “Is she a problem for us?”
Mousey waited for the kid to look back up at him. “Cutting odds, I’d say she’s probably about a four-to-one favourite to kill me in a fight. Yes, that is a problem. A pretty big problem.”
MARRY, BANG, KILL Page 19