Love and Other Wounds

by Jordan Harper

  A bang shook us both from the story. I had my sawed-off up off the bumper and raised before I could see that it was just a fellow who dropped the plastic-wrapped bale he was hauling. I sat back. Houser laughed.

  “You all right?” he asked me. “Seem a mite bit jumpy.”

  “Just tell the story. McClure’s stripper gets called a name, and . . .”

  “Well, what do you think happens? Mad Dog gets out that hammer of his he carries like he’s just some dumb construction worker—”

  “Well, that he is.”

  Houser waved this off, rolling his eyes like I’m the stupid one.

  “Sure he is. Guess that’s why he took that hammer and turned that boy’s front teeth to fairy dust floating in the air.” He mimed a tomahawk chop. “Then he went after the dude’s friends, all three of ’em at a time, and I heard he had two of them on the ground and the third one balls-out running by the time the bouncers got to him.”

  Houser shook his head and swirled his spit cup.

  “Can’t believe you ain’t heard it yet—a mean hombre like yourself ought to know about what the other hardcases are up to.”

  To tell the truth, I didn’t give much credit to the story—chaw juice isn’t the only type of shit known to dribble out Houser’s mouth. But over the next couple of months the hits kept coming. Stories about Mad Dog—and it was always Mad Dog in the telling, never Joe—trickled down and around. Mad Dog smashed the window out of a fellow’s truck and dragged him out to stomp him in the parking lot at Remington’s. Mad Dog and Sunshine—who I guess got smitten when he pulverized that fellow’s incisors—smashing empties against the wall of the Dew Drop with no one there brave enough to say boo about it. Mad Dog cracking the arm of some rent-a-cop down at the Ozarks Empire Fair—he got pulled in on that one, but I never heard nothing coming of it.

  All this time I didn’t see the fellow, as Jackie banned him from the bar after that action with Lewis and I’m pretty loyal about where I do my boozing. But one night I ended up at a little roadhouse just outside of town on account of having just watchdogged a deal out on a farm. It wasn’t the biggest deal I ever saw go down—just a bunch of trembling suckmouthed peckerwoods each scared of their own shadow—but work had been slow as of late. I needed a drink when the deal was done.

  I didn’t recognize him at first, and might not have at all if he hadn’t been sitting with some other fellows from the life that I knew. I shook a few hands before I turned to this fellow in the black tank top.

  “Hello, Geat.”

  Well, what a few months and a new name can do. He’d grown a tangled billy goat beard, for one. For two there was a tattoo—still wet looking—of a slavering pit bull on his bicep. You could see by the way he was sitting and the way everyone else was sitting that he was the fellow in charge. Maybe helping that out was the woman at his side, who I guessed was Sunshine. She was a pretty little thing all right, but she looked at me with that half-lidded kind of look that I’ve learned to stay away from. Both of them looked pretty tricked out with flashy jewelry—diamonds on her fingers, another in his earlobe—and clean clothes. Mad Dog McClure wasn’t hauling rebar for his scratch no more, that much was clear.

  “Hello, Joe,” I say back.

  “It’s Mad Dog these days,” he says back, twisting his trunk so that the tattoo faced me.

  “Course it is,” I say, and take out my wallet and turn to face the bartender. “How about a round for everyone here—and let’s get some shots with that. How’s Wild Turkey sound to a Mad Dog?”

  He smiled and leaned back in his seat like he’d won something.

  “Sounds right, Geat. It sounds right.”

  So we did our shots and drank our beers while people played pool and stuck quarters in the jukebox and played those songs that I guess it’s required by law that you hear every time you step into a bar out here: “Gimme Three Steps,” “Thunderstruck,” “If You Want to Get to Heaven,” shit like that. I mostly sat back and watched the rest of the table slobber all over Mad Dog’s ass. He tried to play it cool, but I could see it plain there behind his mask—he was stone hooked on being Mad Dog. After a while he got up to piss. A minute later I went over to the jukebox like I was thinking of playing a song. When he came out the pisser I waved him over.

  “What can I do you for, Geat? If you’re looking for good music on that juke, forget it. Just that same old redneck shit in there.”

  I didn’t have no idea how to do this. None at all. But it had to be done—somebody had to try to save this boy’s life.

  “Look, Joe—”

  “Mad Dog.”

  Shit. I’d blown it already.

  “Mad Dog, look, man, I just—shit. You need to cut this shit out, amigo.”

  He laughed like he didn’t know what I was talking about, but I could see it in his eyes.

  “Cut what shit, Geat? What shit exactly should I cut out?”

  “You need to get back to your crew and haul some motherfucking rebar and cut out this ‘Mad Dog’ shit. You are not . . . this isn’t you, man. This is not going to end well.”

  “Aw, fuck all that. You think I’m going to sit back and let y’all have all the fun? Think I want to keep getting to the job site at five in the goddamn A.M.? Come on, Geat, I’m not Joe McClure anymore. My name’s Mad Dog, see?”

  He tapped his fingers on that hammerhead on his tool belt. I looked back and saw that the table was staring at us. I turned back, palms up. Chill out, the hands said.

  “All right there, Mad Dog. Look, I understand, I do. But I always thought you were a good fellow back at Jackie Blue’s, and I don’t really want to see no harm come to you. You keep pumping yourself up like this and some shark is going to come by and take you down just so they can have people say, ‘He’s the one who killed Mad Dog.’ You just think about it, okay?”

  I turned to get going, and one of his boys stood up to meet me on the way out, a rat-faced fellow by the name of Webby. He kind of sneered at me, and my first instinct was to rear back and bitch-slap him. Instead, I turned back to Mad Dog.

  “Care to put a leash on your boy?” Mad Dog laughed and waved Webby back in his seat.

  “No hard feelings, Geat. But when you next see old Jackie, you tell him that I don’t take too kindly to being banned, hear?”

  “Now that’s a message that you can deliver yourself, if that’s what you want,” I told him, heading out the door. I was talking to a dead man who wasn’t smart enough to know it yet—a man who’d try to send a message like that to old Jackie Blue. I wish they never named that boy Mad Dog.

  A few weeks later I got a call from Ricky Beal, a fellow who cooks up Nazi dope down around Fair Grove. He told me that him and Bill Houser were planning up “a big ole swap.” I knew what he meant—they’d trade a couple of ounces of meth for a bale of Houser’s weed, simple as can be. They did it every once in a while, and they’d done business enough that they mostly didn’t even bother with me riding along.

  “Well, I don’t mind it,” I told him, “just so long as you know that I do all of Houser’s watchdogging and that’s not a problem for you. Either way, no one’s going to rip no one off on my watch.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s the thing here, Geat. I guess you ain’t heard yet, but Houser done found himself a new watchdog, much as I hate to tell you. And seeing as how I don’t know his new guy, I thought I better bring you along.”

  Now that I thought about it, I hadn’t heard from Houser in a few months. I hated to hear he’d found someone new, though—he was good for quite a bit of my green. It happened every once in a while, though, when someone thought they could save a little money by going outside my circle. Never bothered me none, as those folks usually ended up getting ripped off on the other guy’s watch. One way or another.

  “Geat? Geat, you there?”

  “What? Oh, sure. Sure, I don’t mind coming along. Say, what’s the name of that new fellow Houser got?”

  “Shit, man, it’s Mad Dog McClure.
See why I want a little muscle on my side?”

  Bill Houser’s place sat on a couple of acres just outside Busiek State Forest. Houser didn’t grow his weed on his land. He grew it on the government’s. More than that, the weed he grew he didn’t sell here. He bought Mexican shit weed off the I-44 pipeline and sold that around here, and moved his bud north up the pipeline to Chicago where he could get real money for manicured smoke. The trade was some of his homegrown for some of Ricky Beal’s Nazi dope.

  Mad Dog was late—I knew he would be—and me and Ricky and Houser leaned against the house playing with the dogs. They’d each brought two men with them for doing the heavy lifting and for just a little more comfort. I turned down the beer Houser offered, but those boys had several.

  “Now, Geat,” Houser said as he drew back the beer I’d waved off, “I hope that there’s not any bad blood between us, what with me giving Mad Dog a day in court.”

  “Variety is the spice of life,” I said. “No hard feelings at all.”

  You could hear Mad Dog coming before you could see him. That kind of frog-throat heavy metal that he liked came roaring up the driveway, like he had some kind of devil choir announcing him. The car was one of those little Japanese things with a spoiler on it, red with black flames crawling up the hood. He parked it next to my old truck and got out with a pump shotgun in his hands and that hammer still hanging from his belt. He nodded and swung the shotgun up on his shoulders as he walked our way. I bet the others saw what he wanted them to see, the bad guy making his entrance to the movie. I saw the joy kidlike behind his eyes.

  “Evening, boys.”

  “I told you eight thirty,” Houser said.

  “And I ain’t but ten minutes late, so what?” Mad Dog gave Houser a glare. Houser might have asked what the point of a watchdog was if he wasn’t there before the merchandise, or he might have said how I had been there almost an hour already. But all he did was look down and give that cup of his a little more spit. I pushed one of the dogs away from me and stood up.

  “Hey there, Mad Dog. Good to see you.”

  “Same, Geat.”

  “Boys,” I said to the rest, “before this goes down, me and Mad Dog are going to step inside the house and go over a couple of ground rules.

  “Ground rules?” Houser asked. “What all is that? I don’t recall nothing about there needing to be ground rules.”

  “And I don’t remember you ever being around when a swap’s had two watchdogs,” I said. “It ain’t the normal way, and I know an old hand like Mad Dog can see it clear enough.”

  I took the pistol out of my waistband and tossed it in the gravel. Mad Dog took the hint and laid his shotgun up against the house as he followed me inside. I turned around once we were inside so that Mad Dog had to shut the door and lean against it to face me. Once we were inside, he gave me a smile.

  “Man, this is a fucking rush. You’ve got the life, Geat, for real.”

  “That I do.”

  “You ain’t really got any ground rules, right? I mean, look, Geat, if this is about that night in the bar, my buddy was being a jerk. I told him off. I’m awful sorry about the whole thing. Friends?”

  And he held his hand out to me.

  “I’m awful sorry, too,” I said. I kicked him in the chest. My boot hit him flush. He went back and took the door outside with him.

  “Holy shit!” someone yelled as I came through the empty doorway. The dogs started up howling. Mad Dog looked up at the stars, struggling for breath. He fumbled his hammer out of his belt. I mashed his hand against the gravel. He screamed. I went down on his chest and pulled out my Crosswhite blade. I looked down at his face and there wasn’t a Mad Dog there. Just Joe McClure. I put the blade in behind his collarbone and pushed down until you couldn’t see the cross on the blade. I locked eyes with him. First there was fear and then there was pain and then there was knowing and then there was nothing.

  I wiped the blade on his shirt as I stood.

  “Boys, we’ve got a deal to do, then I got a piece of trash to dump out in the forest.”

  Houser dropped his spit cup so the brown gunk splashed out. In the moonlight it looked a lot like Joe’s blood.

  “He killed Mad Dog. Geat killed Mad Dog McClure.”

  That was what he said. And I knew that pretty soon that was what everyone would be saying. The power of that name would come to me, the way it does for a cannibal who eats his enemy’s heart.

  “Geat killed Mad Dog McClure.”

  I am sorry that they named that boy Mad Dog. But I don’t blame you if you don’t believe me now.

  PLAYING DEAD

  We got greedy, every one of us. Greed’s fine. Greed gets you up in the morning. But we got soft, too. That’s how Birdie catches us slipping.

  Sloppy. All the coke is laid out on the table. Sloppy. Kody’s on watch with his gun on the other side of the room. Sloppy. I never got that dead bolt that Devin told me to get. It was just a matter of time.

  It happens fast. One second we’re talking shit and cutting the coke with vitamin B. The next the door explodes and the Port Side Massive comes through. Big bad Birdie leads the way with an AK pointed at my head. I don’t recognize the rest, aside from Birdie’s brother Little Bird, and I can’t decipher their yells. The yardies talk in that Jamaican patois, thick syllables that bounce off American ears. But anybody can translate a gun to the head. In the front room a couple of them toss the six keys of coke into duffel bags. They make me, Kody, Skinny, and Dap strip down butt-ass naked. They yank the gold right off our necks, even yank the fronts off Skinny’s teeth. They herd us into the bathroom, into the clawfoot tub. I press up against the tiles so my crotch don’t dangle against Skinny’s fat ass in front of me.

  “Move you backsides, Brooklyn boys,” Birdie says as he herds us into the tub, dropping enough of the accent so we can understand. “Don’t need no cuss-cuss nor fuckery. Come an’ get baptized, now.”

  He pushes Skinny aside with the barrel of the gun to get in my face. His eyes are the color of old hard-boiled eggs. His dreads hang woolly and thick. Even in the stank-ass bathroom, his smell of ganja sweat and grease cuts through.

  “Oi, it be Liver Johnson.” Birdie taps my skull with the barrel. “Big ’bout you, mon. Tell me, Mr. Liver—where I be finding you bloodclot friend Devin? I can’t find no hide nor hair of the bumbaclot boy.”

  The crack game in Brooklyn ran smooth through ’92, at least compared to the craziness up north in Queens. Then the Jamaicans showed up last year. I’m talking real island boys, not the Fat Cat crew from Jamaica, Queens. The Jamaicans don’t play nice. They drop bodies and rip off anything they can grab. Don Gorgon ran the Port Side Massive up until last week. Devin caught him slipping outside a curry-goat shack on Fulton. Gorgon had ripped off a safe house like this one near MDC Brooklyn, and Devin put a sunroof in his dome for his troubles. Back a week Birdie was just Gorgon’s number one rudeboy. Now he’s in charge. He ought to say thanks.

  “I don’t know where Devin’s at,” I say, “and that’s real.” It’s true, not that I’d say different if it weren’t. “That shit’s between him and you. You want to jack us, jack us, but I’m not snitching to you any more than I’m going to snitch to the cops.”

  He splits a smile, but it doesn’t touch those rotten eyes.

  “If ya kyann catch Quaco, ya catch him shirt,” Birdie says, pouring the island sounds on thick. But I understand and my guts turn to water. I thought maybe this was just a scare tactic, herding us naked into the bathroom like this. But it’s not.

  “Nigga, what? What shirt?” Kody asks. I could tell him, but I’m too busy getting set to die. I’m not ready.

  Birdie turns on the shower. We jump and bump each other in the ice-cold spray. I press against the tiles. Skinny’s big ass shimmies. I don’t want to look, but that’s all I get in my field of vision, and I don’t want to die with my eyes closed. It’s Auntie Ruth who brings me back down from the hysteria. She’s going to find out that I go
t put down in a safe house bathtub, bare-ass and dead in a pile of coke-slingers. Scandalous.

  Kody turns around and it’s like he wants to say something like I’m sorry or Make it stop, but he doesn’t. Shit, I’m not mad at him for not covering the door. Not one of us had a gat bigger than a .32. What were we going do when five yardies with AKs bust through the door but die? Over Skinny’s shoulder I see Birdie spit something to his brother, Little Bird. Birdie walks out of the room. His brother raises his machine pistol.

  “Drop them bloodclots,” Birdie says.

  Just before everything explodes, Skinny barks a laugh.

  “Shit, little nigga, bring it.”

  The world goes thundercloud.

  “If you can’t catch Quaco, you catch his shirt.” Devin says as he’s opening the trunk. Six keys of pure base in a duffel bag waits for me. It’s the last six before Devin goes underground. With the Port Side Massive gunning hard for him, he knows his shelf life on the street is milk-short. “That’s what those goat-eatin’ motherfuckers say.”

  “Quaco?” I ask. “Who names somebody Quaco?”

  “I know I’m not hearing you talk that shit. Who named you Liver?”

  “You did, motherfucker,” I say, and then we’re laughing. They call me Liver because I’m high yellow as a motherfucker, with a white mom and all, so back in the day Devin said I looked jaundiced. A bunch of the kids on the block had to run to the dictionary before they laughed at that one.

  “Let it slide,” he says. “Quaco ain’t the point here.”

  “All right, then. If you got a point, lay it out.”

  “It means if you can’t catch a slippery motherfucker, you catch what you can reach. Put a hurt on his homies, his pad, his family and shit. Don’t matter if they did anything wrong or not. If you can’t catch Quaco, you catch his shirt. You see what I’m saying?”