Shelby

by McCormack, Pete;

  “I’m a foot away.”

  “I can hear you now.”

  “Okay. So here it is: Pie looks great from the outside, right?”

  “What pie?”

  “Let me finish. So you see it and think, ‘God, this is going to taste great’. Yummy pie, right?”

  “Okay.”

  “Then you cut a slice and fish tails fall out all over the place …”

  I sat bewitched by her beguiling eyes, fully erect and throbbing to tell her so in a more poetic manner.

  “So you stare at this gross pie for days and days and you start to get hungry. So you take a bite and you realise it’s not so bad after all. In fact, if you were starving you’d be more than grateful.”

  “Hm.”

  “That’s the way of the world, Shelby. Everything depends on the vantage point, what your basic needs are and, to a lesser degree, what you desire after that. It’s all just Fish-tail pie.” She looked at me sideways and from the corner of her eye. “I couldn’t sell it to you,” she said. “I want you to have it …” Out of the paper bag she pulled Fish-tail Pie and placed it in my hands.

  “Me?”

  She laughed. “Yeah, you.” I sat silent. “Say something.”

  “Oh Suzanne … kiss me.”

  “What?”

  “Please. No more games.”

  “Shelby …”

  “Let us slam our naked bodies against the madness.”

  “You look weird.”

  “Cast our fates and morals to the high sea!” I wrapped my arms around her and we tumbled backwards, me on top.

  “Get off me!”

  “You and I!” I cried.

  “Shelby!”

  Holding her down, I pulled my face back to kiss her on the lips. At that moment her hand grabbed onto my cheek and dug into my face.

  “Get off me!”

  My head jerked back in pain and I tumbled away as a few stinging wacks pounced off the side of my head. My face and eyes burned.

  “What are you doing?”

  I peeked through my arms to see Suzanne staring at me aghast.

  “You’re sick,” she said, teeth clenched.

  “Suzanne, I—”

  “Get away from me!”

  “Suzanne …” She ran from the room. “Suzanne!” I screamed again, swinging out at the air. All was still. Hyperventilating, I leapt to my feet having joined the ranks of the sexually deviant; the abusers, the molesters, the harrassers. Suzanne had offered me her spirit incarnate and I’d thanked her as would a rabid Rottweiler with his jaws around one’s nose. Sprinting towards the door I stumbled on nothing as if tripped by God Himself, crumbling headfirst into the wall. Prostrate and dazed, a sparkle to my left caught my eye. There was Fish-tail Pie, upside down, two broken tails inches away. I let out a sob and forced myself to my feet.

  “Suzanne!” I cried again, running out of the room, scanning the hallway and then tearing into the kitchen. “Suzanne!”

  “What the hell happened to your face?” Eric said, twisting from his seat at the kitchen table.

  “Nothing. Honest.”

  “What do you mean nothing?”

  “Oh Eric! What have I done?”

  “What have you done?”

  “I’ve … I’ve assaulted a woman, okay!”

  “What?”

  “Suzanne. She declined my kisses and I fell on top of her and she clawed my face.”

  “And?”

  My breathing quickened. I could not speak.

  “You bastard!”

  “I didn’t mean to break it!”

  “What?”

  “She clawed my face. I tumbled away. Fish-tail Pie must have fallen. Suzanne stood staring at me, aghast. Before I could apologise, she was gone.”

  “Did you hurt her?”

  “No.”

  “Where is she?”

  I shrugged.

  “Okay, man, that’s it. I’m getting my gun.” He pushed me out of the way and strutted towards his room.

  “I didn’t mean anything!” I said, whimpering a few feet behind.

  “Not for you, asshole! We got to deal with Frank.”

  “Frank?”

  “You want to deal with this guy? We’ll deal with him.” Eric reached to the top of his closet and pulled down a revolver.

  “No violence!” I shrieked.

  Eric turned and glared.

  “I’ve seen too much already.”

  “Who do I look like? Gerry the Gent? We’re just gonna warn the bastard.”

  “Why now? I need to find Suzanne.”

  Eric cracked me on the side of the head with an open hand. “The guy shattered your manhood—all your courage. Look at you, man! Assaulting a woman! I ought to beat the shit out o’ you right here.”

  “This is where it happened,” I moaned, turning, staring at the bed. I fell to my knees, gathering up Fish-tail Pie in my arms.

  Eric took a last look at the gun before stuffing it in his pocket. “She needs a good polish,” he said, “but she’ll still do the job.”

  “I’m more than a little nervous,” I said.

  “626 Cordova,” Eric said to the cab driver as we sped towards the city center. He turned to me. “You sure this is the right address?”

  “There was only one Frank Sagan in the book. Anyway, Lucy told me he lived down in the bowery.”

  “Okay then,” he said, leaning back in the seat, taking a long drag on his cigarette, “on with the show.”

  “What a dump,” Eric whispered as we stumbled inebriated up the fire stairwell in search of 201. It turned out to be the first door on the right, second floor. “Bingo.”

  “What?”

  Eric pulled the revolver from his pocket and held it by his side. “Now we knock. Then we give Frankie-boy the only kind of talkin’-to he’ll listen to. Stand over there.” Eric pointed me off to the side, rapped on the door three times and leaned his back against the wall. We waited, listening. Silence. Eric leaned forward and knocked. Again no answer.

  “I’d bet he’s at his club,” I said, “it’s Saturday night.”

  “Yeah. Shit. ’Course he is.”

  “We should get back to the party, shouldn’t we?”

  “Au contraire, mon ami.” Eric dug into his jacket pocket and removed a Swiss Army Knife, clipped open the nail file and began prodding at the door handle.

  “Eric, please. Already my night … illicit drugs, Suzanne, now breaking and entering. The widening gyre is spinning beyond control. I need—” Click.

  “Got it.” Eric pushed open the door and crept inside.

  “I cannot go through with it,” I said.

  “Okay, man.”

  “Okay? You’re … we’re going home?”

  “You can. I’m gonna wait for Frankie-boy and let him know what it’s all about.”

  “On your own?”

  “Well, me and my lover,” he said, raising the pistol.

  “You’d do that for me?”

  “God, it stinks worse than our place in here.” Eric clicked a light switch just inside the door, revealing a virtually unfurnished apartment littered with fast-food wrappers and clothes and glass bottles. “Needles,” Eric said, pointing to the coffee table. “Does he deal?”

  “Does who deal?”

  “Frank! Does he sell?”

  “I don’t know,” I said with a shrug as I surveyed the room.

  “So are you stayin’ or goin’?” he asked.

  “… and I literally fell on top of her,” I whined, brushing tears from my eyes. “I’ve become a truly rotten person.”

  “What time is it?” Eric asked. I angled my watch into the lamplight that shone across the room.

  “One-thirty.”

  “How long we been here?”

  “Eighty-two minutes.”

  “Hm. If he is at his club he probably won’t be here ’til after two.”

  “I feel ill.”

  “Nerves?”

  “I’m not sure.
Squeamish.”

  “Shut up.”

  “What?”

  “Footsteps …”

  “… I don’t know why I’ve always felt such a need to be relevant to my fellow humans. Granted my parents believed me to be somewhat of an academic prodigy in my formative years. Nonetheless, how it all manifest—”

  “What time is it?”

  “Uh … five after two.”

  “Okay. You gotta stop your yappin’, man. Frankie-boy should be showin’ up any second …”

  “… it wasn’t so much his urinating on the dash that bothered me. The fact is I was floored by his massive endowment. Suddenly there was a whole new—and perhaps paranoid—reality to Lucy’s dismissal of my sexual advancements.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Twenty after three.”

  “Where the hell is he?”

  “… the irony being that dropping out of university I assumed I would find unbridled freedom and instead wound up addicted to television. And what now in the wake of my assault on Suzanne?”

  “What the hell were you thinking?” he said, cigarette end glowing in the darkness.

  “I … I don’t know. I pray she’ll forgive me. I think I was desperate to be sought after and for the briefest of moments actually thought I was.”

  “She sure skinned your face. Does it hurt?”

  “That’s the extraordinary thing. In light of such a grave mistake on my part and now my waiting to threaten Frank with a deadly weapon, here I sit shrouded in a sea of infinite calm.”

  “Weird.”

  “And how long can it last? Surely it isn’t true peace.”

  “What time is it?”

  “You just—good God. Twenty past four.”

  “Jesus. Maybe he ain’t coming home.”

  “What?”

  “It’s four-thirty. Where the hell could he be?”

  “I sup—”

  “Shut up.” We both froze in the darkness as a door slammed in the distance. Eric grabbed my shirt and yanked me behind him. “This could be it,” he said, bracing himself, the gun firmly grasped at his side.

  “Anything?” I whispered.

  “I gotta take a leak.”

  “Nerves.”

  “Beer.”

  There was a pause. “It doesn’t sound like whoever was there is there anymore.”

  “I tell you, man,” Eric said matter-of-factly, “I don’t think he’s coming.”

  “What should we do?”

  “We’ll write him a note. Let him know he might lose an eye or something if he doesn’t back off.”

  “An eye?”

  Eric clicked on the light. “Got any paper?”

  I felt through my Gortex jacket and found a pen in the breast pocket. Eric picked up a slightly stained brown paper bag off the coffee table and tore it down one side.

  “This’ll do,” he said, handing it to me.

  “What should I write?”

  “Uh … Hey Frankie-boy, just thought we’d leave you a little warning … hang on a sec, I gotta take a leak. Keep an eye on the door.” Eric disappeared around the corner.

  “For the record, Eric, I fear threatening him may only serve to—”

  “Oh God.”

  “What?”

  “Oh shit.”

  “What?”

  “Come here, man.”

  “No.”

  “Come here.”

  “Why?”

  “Come here.”

  I nervously walked to the end of the room to see Eric standing frozen in the doorway, staring. I peeked over his shoulder. “Aaah!”

  “Easy, jeez.”

  On the bed lay Frank; still, nude, horribly white, a peach towel around his hairy waist, his genitalia unavoidably exposed. He had one leg bent, the other straight out. There were what looked like hockey cards stacked all over the floor. The room was muggy and stale.

  “Look at that thing,” Eric said.

  “Is he dead?”

  Eric shrugged and gingerly approached the body, brushing Frank’s hand as a game warden would fearing to wake a tranquilized bear. “Stiff,” he said.

  “Is he breathing?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Are those hockey cards?”

  He bent down towards Frank’s hand. “Look at this, man, a Bobby Orr rookie card.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  “He musta been playin’ with ’em when … when …”

  “Eric, what are we going to do?”

  Eric turned to me, his eyes glancing left and right as though seeking possibilities. “Split.”

  “What?”

  “You got a better idea?”

  “What if he’s still alive? We should call 911.”

  “He’s stiff.”

  “We have to report it.”

  “Shel, we broke into his place.”

  “We can’t abandon him.”

  “We have a gun, man. You already assaulted Suzanne tonight. They’d find out in about two seconds the guy punched your face in. It might even come out about what he did to your car.”

  “So?”

  “So what are we gonna do? Make him dinner? Look at your face. It’s a mess. What would you tell the feds? A birthmark? You’d be revenge suspect number one …”

  “Suspect …”

  “We gotta split, man.”

  “And go where?”

  “Home.”

  “Home?”

  “Where else we gonna go …?”

  XIX

  Razis tore out his bowels with both hands and flung them at the crowds. So he died, calling on Him who is lord of life and spirit to restore them to him again.

  —II Maccabees

  “I can’t make it on my own.”

  “I got you the glue,” Eric said, tossing it on the pull-out couch.

  “Oh wretched humanity!” I cried, perched on top of the covers, slightly fetal, leaning over Fish-tail Pie, its two broken tails resting on my thigh. “Man-made decisions will be the end of us all!”

  “You still got the runs?”

  “I surrender to God, Eric. Right here, you as my witness.”

  “Look, man, you did nothin’ wrong. We were protecting Lucy. Frank was dead when we got there.”

  The phone rang. Eric picked it up. “Yeah?” Eye movement. “Oh. Oh … hi … yeah, just a sec.” Eric covered the receiver with his right hand and groaned. “It’s Lucy,” he said.

  “Oh no. What does she want?”

  “You.”

  I took the receiver. “Hello?”

  “Can you come over?”

  “You’re home.”

  “I need you to come over.”

  “Really? Is everything—”

  “It’s Frank.”

  “Oh … okay. I’m on my way.” I hung up.

  “What’d she say?”

  “She wants me to come over.”

  “Does she know?”

  “I think so.”

  “About us?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The door opened. There was Lucy. “What happened to your face?” she said.

  “Oh … uh … Eric and I were wrestling.”

  “Frank’s dead,” she said.

  “What?” A police officer stood in the hallway.

  “Shel, this is … sorry I forgot your name.”

  “Kravchuck.”

  “Officer Kravchuck.”

  The officer extended his hand and offered a tight-lipped nod of acknowledgement as we shook. “Well, Mrs. Moon, I’ll get out of your way. My deepest sympathies.”

  “Thank you. Thanks for your help.” Lucy escorted the man out, closed the door and turned to me, her face expressionless.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “He O.D.’d.”

  “Really?”

  “The dumb bastard,” she said. “He never shot up while I was with him.”

  “He killed himself?”

  “Smack, they figure. T
here’s some super potent shit goin’ around,” she said, raising her hands to her face and rubbing her eyes. “They found a strange note on the floor outside his bedroom.”

  “Hm. What kind of note?”

  “Some sort of half-written warning. Cops asked me if I could name any enemies. I said it’d be easier to name friends. None.” Lucy walked into the front room and picked up a packet of cigarettes from the coffee table.

  “How do you feel?”

  She shrugged. “They found him on his bed. He’d been dead for two days.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I was married to the man! I should at least be crying.”

  “You never cry.”

  “They got tipped about the body from a couple of strange phone calls at dawn this morning.”

  “Strange?”

  “Some guy. Very high strung. Maybe another user, they figure.”

  “I bet he wasn’t that strange,” I said, disgusted at my inability to own up.

  Lucy put her cigarette in her mouth. “Well … I’m back!” she said.

  An acute pain gripped my lower intestine. I winced, and actually felt the colour drain from my face. “Could I use your washroom?”

  “Of course.”

  Due to the speed of the attack, I had to wobble with my cheeks clenched just to keep it all at bay. Skirting around the corner and into the bathroom, I turned on both the hot and cold taps in the sink, yanked down my corduroys and sitting down on the bowl let the rest happen voluntarily.

  Amidst noxious fumes, it came to me that life does not last, love is eternal and humanity, in its urge to have The Answers, has made blunder after blunder. Denial of this had already left me unable to accept Suzanne’s wondrous gift. My God, she came offering her soul and I, terrified by honesty, lashed out like an animal. And why? Because just as God cannot stomach sin, liars despise honesty. It would seem general confusion exacerbated by drugs and alcohol had left my troubadour within trampled by his very own horse. And now in the front room stood a troubled Lucy, my one love, relaying to me police details that I already knew!

  And so, prostrate on Lucy’s bed sometime later that evening I confessed to the previous night’s commotion at Frank’s apartment and begged her not to make me go to the police. Lucy was a combination exalted and appalled—much like life itself, I thought to myself, suddenly aware that all was coming to me as metaphors of existence. I told her Eric and I had reason to believe the last thing Frank did was read Bobby Orr’s scoring statistics. For fear of overload, I made no mention of my attack on Suzanne, instead carrying that guilt around as bursts and bubbles of intestinal spasm. I was shocked that both the person I most loved and the person I most despised had died within months of each other. What did this mean? Exhaustion eventually freed me in the form of slumber, the drift of rain in my ears, the taste of Pepto-Bismol in my mouth.