Love and Other Wounds

by Jordan Harper

  “You saying that you got beef with the Port Side, and you plan on getting real slippery. So if these dreadlock motherfuckers can’t get at you, they’re coming to get at me?”

  “Liver, I ain’t promising you they gonna come. I’m just saying, it’s in the realm of possibilities. It’s no secret that you and I put in work together. I ain’t trying to fuck with you. If I knew these motherfuckers got so damn tribal, I might have thought twice before lighting up Don Gorgon. I’m telling everyone I know to watch out. Don’t get a big head over it.”

  He gave it to me straight up. I don’t blame him. I’m a grown-ass man and I could have taken care of myself. But deep down I never thought the posse would come for me. Last week I thought I was going live forever. Now I’m counting seconds.

  Skinny saves my life three times. The first time was when he opened his mouth just before the yardies light us up. Every single one of them starts the killing with him. When the first claps come, I just drop. Bullets puff plaster and tiles over my head, but none of them touch me. That’s the second way Skinny saves my life. Motherfucker is so big that none of the yardies see that they don’t hit me. The third way Skinny saves me—wait on it.

  Skinny’s head hits the wall while most of him falls on top of me. My breath goes out. More weight crashes on my legs. I smash my nose against the tub floor. It’s gritty. No one’s cleaned this tub in an age. The shooting stops for the time it takes me to take one gasp of air and then it starts again, bullets raking the pile. One shot, slowed from going through Skinny, clangs loud against the side of the tub so close I can smell it. Each second I think it’s over, but nothing stops. There’s smoke and blood and booms and stench and mist and white noise from the showerhead.

  I’m not even grazed. The bodies on top of me shudder the last drops of life out of them. I wish those yardies turned the water warm. Not because I’m cold, I’m way past worrying about that, but because I can feel the difference between the cold water and the blood dripping hot off the corpses of my friends. A weight slams down, pressing my face harder against the floor of the tub. Dap fell out onto the floor when they turned him to a rag doll, and now they dump him back in. He empties like a tipped garbage pail.

  I try to listen. These boys have done their dirt. Now all they have to do is pack up the coke and hit the road. I can play dead until they leave. Then I find Devin and we go hunting for the rest of our days. Show these yardies what a war is. Just as soon as they leave. Just as soon as—

  The water rises. Some part of Kody blocks the drain. Shit’s been inching up and now it’s starting to fill my nose. If I twist my head, then Skinny on top of me will shift and the yardies might see it and do some double-checking. My arm’s extended over my head. I move it sloooow.

  “What you mean I’m’a stay and watch them boys?” It sounds like Little Bird. “Bumbaclots going nowhere—dead don’t walk.”

  “Yeah, them boys is going to move.” That’s older brother Birdie. “Them coming with us, once we fix them right. Got to get them ready for travel—for easy packing. The rest of us is goin’ to make a run to get the tools.”

  Water plugs my nostrils—it takes all I’ve got to stop from blowing out. I take little tastes of air with the high side of my mouth. I’ve got less than a minute before that’s gone too.

  “What tools?” Bird asks.

  Kody’s forearm blocks the drain. I get my hand under, so it’s my palm blocking the drain. It might slurp and that’ll get Birdie and Little Bird’s attention. Or might not. I tense up and get ready to chance it.

  “Cutlasses. Machetes. We going take these Brooklyn boys to pieces and leave Devin with a mystery, see? So you sit tight, little rudeboy, until we come back with the proper.”

  The drain slurps, one quick burst. I piss one warm trickle. My breath comes back in short hard draws as I wait for Birdie to come poking. But there’s nothing but the shower static.

  I can’t make out much in the front room. It sounds like it happens the way Birdie said. Him and the posse leave to get carving tools to chop up me and the boys like jerk chicken. I’m blind and half deaf at the bottom of the tub with no idea if Little Bird is out on the stoop or sitting on the shitter three feet away. But I do know they left him with something, which puts him up on me.

  But now’s better than never, and never is showing up when Birdie comes back with the machetes. You can’t play dead through a dismemberment. My body’s aching all over from ice water and dead weight all pressing on me. I pull in my arm, playing Twister with stiffs. My elbow pops—I wait for the bullets—the bullets don’t come. I raise up from under Skinny, not looking at his face. His half-a-face. I break out to the surface. Pushing Skinny aside sets something loose. He barks a death rattle. For a second I think it’s mine. I look around. The bathroom is empty. I live a few more minutes at least.

  I’m standing in the spray, stepping out of the tub. Our clothes are gone. The yardies stole my drawers. The door is open. I can’t see Little Bird. I’m looking for something to split his dome. Looking and seeing nothing. I don’t have long. Birdie has to have his machetes stashed someplace. I don’t think the yardies are at the hardware store shopping right now. I take a peek through the doorway. Little Bird’s sitting in the same chair I was in thirty minutes ago with his back to me. He thinks any threat to him is coming through the door, not from the tub full of corpses. Maybe he’s right. Back in the bathroom I can’t find anything to kill him with. I could rip off the towel rack, but it’s flimsy fake brass. There’s one old toothbrush. It’d work to shove that through the eyeball straight into the brain, but that’s crazy kung fu shit and I can’t take that kind of chance. That leaves a bottle of shampoo and a dirty-ass towel. Even covered in the blood of my friends I can’t think of anything murderous to do with a shampoo bottle, so that leaves the towel.

  I soak the towel over Dap’s body. I twist it tight into a rope and come creeping on Little Bird. My feet stick as I go through the kitchen. We kept it sloppy here. Real sloppy. But that’s over now. I cross my arms, slip the towel over Little Bird’s neck, and straighten my elbows like I’m ripping something apart. He claws at it. He makes noises like a busted radiator. He kicks his life out onto the dirty linoleum.

  His drawers got piss in them, so I wear his baggy jeans commando and slip on the fat flannel shirt. Baggy gear means everything fits everybody. I’m ready to make a break for it when I hear Birdie and his men coming back. Dance hall garbage from the car stereo gives them away. I think quick, stuff Little Bird’s hat with newspaper like it’s full of dreads. They left Little Bird holding a MAC-10. I check it. Locked and loaded. I step to the midnight air just as the yardies roll up. In the dark they just see the Rasta shape standing in the doorway, not my liver skin.

  I light them up. Bap-bap-bap-bap-bap. I don’t run. In this part of Brooklyn, cops wouldn’t check out a mushroom cloud. I come up slow, covering them—if one of them is playing dead, that’d be some funny shit. Pot smoke snakes out the bullet holes—the yardies went out so high they might not know they’re dead yet. I jerk open the door. The dome light shines through a film of blood and brains onto three dead yardies. Three. No Birdie.

  Well, fuck that shit, I think, I’ll see that nigga another day, and I start to break out—and then stop.

  If you can’t catch Quaco, you catch his shirt. When they find the bodies of Kody, Dap, and Skinny back there in the tub, not cut up, and my body nowhere to be found, Birdie can do the math. He knows me. He’ll figure me for a playacting motherfucker who rose from the dead to cap his brother.

  I wanted to know who Quaco was, and now he’s me. I’m him. And if Birdie can’t catch me, he catch my shirt. Auntie Ruth, my cousin Kianna, friends from grade school I don’t even remember. Birdie will kill them all now that I’ve smoked Little Bird.

  I can’t have it. Maybe Devin can live with his shit spilling all over the damn place, but not me. I’ll chew on this MAC before I let that happen. And I realize that maybe that’s my only choice. Leav
e myself just one more body in this big pile that’s growing bigger by the minute. Better that than what happens if Birdie finds out I’m alive.

  If they find the other three bodies. But if I make Skinny and the boys disappear the way Birdie wanted us to be gone, Birdie won’t have a fucking clue what happened, and he sure won’t figure I raised up from the dead. Let him put Little Bird on Devin. That’s where it belongs in the first place. Make it look like they caught me, and they won’t have to look to catch my shirt. If I do what I’m thinking I have to do, it means that I play dead for real. This life would be as over as if I’d caught one back in that bathroom. It means being a ghost. I already feel like one.

  I reach past the dead yardie driver and pop the trunk to get the machete. Turns out Birdie was being poetic with that word. It’s a chainsaw back there. I pick it up and head to the house. I hate to think about what I’m going back in there to do. But shit, they’re all dead in that bathtub anyhow. They won’t ever know what I’m going to do to them. They won’t feel a thing. And now Skinny gets to save my sorry-ass life one more time.

  RED HAIR AND BLACK LEATHER

  She had an ass like a heart turned upside down and torn in half, and that’s what you call foreshadowing, friend. It was a slow Wednesday afternoon at the bar and in walks this gal, red hair pouring over her shoulders, wearing a wifebeater and black leather pants. And all of the sudden the Cards game on the teevee didn’t seem so interesting.

  “Nice place.”

  She pulled herself onto a stool in front of me, thumping a big leather purse onto the stool next to her. Strictly speaking, what she said was a lie. Jackie Blue’s isn’t much to look at, brick and linoleum, bars on the only window up front, old neon signs on the wall. But still it sounded like she meant it. She had a southern lilt, not that twang that you get around here, and it made whatever she said sound like sunshine and kittens.

  “Thanks.”

  “It yours?”

  “Indeed it is.”

  “Well, I guess that makes you Jackie Blue, am I right?”

  “Well, I’m Jackie, anyway,” I said. I haven’t answered to Jackie Blue in a long time.

  “Jackie Blue . . . Isn’t that the name of a song?”

  “By the Ozark Mountain Daredevils, as a matter of fact. You find yourself in the Queen City of the Ozarks just now, if you didn’t know it.” She wrinkled her nose at that.

  “Is that where I am? I had wondered. I hope you don’t mind me saying, she doesn’t look much like a queen.”

  “Well, take a look ’round the rest of the Ozarks and get back to me on that.”

  She dropped a smile on me that peeled about twenty years off my old hide. That might have put me about even with her.

  “Jolene,” she said, and put out a freckled hand for me to take. It felt hot to the touch.

  “Well now, that’s the name of a song as well, right?” She groaned a little at this—I guessed she wasn’t a Dolly Parton fan.

  “What can I do you for, Jolene?” I asked.

  “I’ll take a Wild Turkey neat with a Dr. Pepper back, if you please.”

  That is a drink order that makes a man sit up and take notice. I poured the liquor in a highball glass and filled a twin for myself. Owning a bar you want to watch things like drinking in the day. But there’s exceptions for everything, and this was shaping into an exceptional day. She took a hard swallow of the Turkey. I could see it play havoc with the muscles in her throat, but it never touched her face.

  “So now, Jolene, seeing as how you don’t know where you are, maybe it’s a pointless question, but what brings you to town?”

  She smiled, but this time there was a little crack to it, like there was something that wasn’t a smile underneath. She put her hand on her purse like it was fitting to fly off, then dug in it for some of those skinny toothpick cigarettes that ladies sometimes smoke.

  “Jackie, I’ll tell you what it is. I’m in town for exactly two reasons. One’s to drink Wild Turkey. The other is to get laid.”

  I’ve had it every other way I can think of, but I’ve never had it served to me sizzling on a platter like that. Nobody ever has it that easy, I’d bet, other than the rich, the famous, and the folks in porno movies. There was something there in the back of the skull telling me that God made up his mind long ago that I’m not that lucky and the strings you can’t see usually turn to chains. But sometimes you got to jump just ’cause the chasm is there. Hell, what was I going to do, go back to watching the Cards?

  I topped my glass to the rim, then hers. Then I held up that near-full bottle of Wild Turkey up between us and poured the whole thing into the sink.

  “Fresh out of Wild Turkey,” I told her.

  She laid that smile on me again and it peeled off another couple of years so that now she was the older one, the one in charge.

  “Maybe you want to close up shop early,” she said, sliding off the stool.

  “Maybe I do.”

  I walked around the bar, hoping she couldn’t see me tenting out my jeans. I threw the dead bolt on the front door and pulled the strings on the blinds on the window. Before I did I peeked out into the parking lot, which was empty except my old truck. Maybe she parked down the street, I figured, and turned to ask her. The words got jammed in my mouth. She was in the corner of the bar, sitting on the glass top of the sit-down Ms. Pac-Man machine. I wondered if her ass was cold, seeing as how while my back was turned she’d stripped out of those black leather pants.

  “I thought this would be fine,” she said, patting the video game table under her ass. It was fine, all right. Fine, indeed.

  And time passed slowly and well, the way it did back when I was young and it seemed like everything would last forever. Every now and then someone would rattle the door, as the regulars who couldn’t believe I would shut the door came calling. A few times the phone rang, and I knew that had to be some right thirsty boys indeed who’d go home to look the number up to see if they could rouse me. But none of the noise bothered us at all, except once, later on after the sun set and there wasn’t any light but the orange glow of the Budweiser clock over the bar. A noise like a long loud rip of fabric went by. It was the sound of a motorcycle, something chopped and mufflerless. At that, Jolene stiffened under me like a deer that hears the step of a clumsy hunter. But then it passed and faded and after a few seconds she unlocked her joints and turned back to a slippery slick she-devil. Where there’d been fear in her eyes, I saw only thunder.

  So we talked and then we’d wrestle some more, and then talk again. She told me about growing up in Georgia, about how her grandmother was an honest-to-God dirt eater who’d scoop soil off the ground and pop it in her mouth. She told me about how football was king then and how she’d put her prom dress on layaway. She told me more than that, and I noticed that none of her stories ever reached up into the past few years. What had happened to her since that prom stayed a mystery.

  And I talked too, and if she really listened she might have noticed that I did just the opposite. Everything I told her was in the now, ever since I opened Jackie Blue’s. Mostly stories about what the drunks did, like the time Mad Dog McClure opened up Mike Lewis’s head with a claw hammer not a foot from where we now lay. Stories about bad men, but I didn’t delve back into the dark days back when I was bad myself.

  So when we talked, we kept our secrets. But when we weren’t talking, there were no lies between us, and she saw me for who I used to be. A dangerous man. And I saw her as a woman in danger. So much danger. I got it in my head that maybe I was the man to get her out, and then I thought maybe that was just what she wanted me to think.

  We slept on a bed of our clothes and woke around dawn to birdsong outside. It was a sound that didn’t fit in Jackie Blue’s any more than if you heard Lynyrd Skynyrd coming out of the treetops. God, she still looked good in that morning light, and let me tell you: that was a thing I wasn’t used to anymore. A man who owns himself a bar don’t hardly ever need to go to bed alone,
but what you wake up with is usually a poisoned head and possum bait smiling next to you, the kind you’d chew your arm off to get away from. But not her. I stared at her until my old eyes started to burn, and then I took some time to look at me instead. The fur on my chest and belly had all faded from black to gray over the last few years, like I’d spent the time soaking in hot water and the color had leached on out. The gut had gotten bigger, but I hadn’t gone soft. No, not yet. Under the faded india ink tattoos on my forearm I still had some ropes of muscle from hauling kegs and tossing drunks. Maybe I wasn’t just Jackie the bartender yet. Maybe there was still some Jackie Blue underneath, ready to bark at the moon.

  She turned herself over, blinking in the sunlight, just as I was finished pulling on my old leather boots.

  “Good morning, cowboy,” she said, not bothering to cover herself in the daylight. “Sorry to see you’ve already got yourself dressed. A lot of effort for nothing, if you ask me.”

  “Protein,” I said. “This old goat needs protein if he’s planning on walking, much less working, today. There’s a diner down a block, should be opening about now. How do you like your eggs?”

  She sat up and hugged herself, as if all the sudden she knew she was naked. Then she slipped that mask back on and leaned back to show herself, pale skin against the leather pants beneath her.

  “I’ll put you to work, Daddy,” she said. “All you need is a little bit of that popcorn and a belt of brown stuff to get you back in the saddle. What do you say?”

  Lord, even after the night she’d gave me there was something in me kicking its heels up for more. But I picked up my keys, partways because I truly needed some grub, and partways to force her hand. It was time to get some truth from the little lady.

  “Over easy suit you?” I jingled my keys at her.