Love and Other Wounds

by Jordan Harper

  They’d wound up in some blues bar full of hoosiers. Tommy was getting numb. Started getting the itch. Nikki had been the one to name it in one of their fights near the end of it all. She called it the drunkard’s paradox. Everybody’s got their share of pain, even though it always feels like more than their share. Pain is part of the deal. Painlessness outside of death is an unnatural condition, she’d said. A man can’t get to where he’s feeling no pain for too long before it starts to itch at him. Before he starts to notice the hole where his pain’s supposed to go. Pretty soon he starts needing the thing he was just running away from. Fiending for pain. That was Tommy, she said.

  Geat made conversation with a table of men and women from South County. One of the women, a silver streak in her hair like Nikki’s, leaned into her man and whispered something that made the man’s eyes come alive with lust. Tommy, the itch burning now, told a joke. He told it loud, with fuck-you eyes for the whole table.

  “How do you get a South County gal to suck your dick?” he asked. “Put ranch on it.”

  The South County boys, filled up with liquid courage, got riled up. Geat tried to squelch it. Him and Geat had been outnumbered five to two. Bad odds for the South County boys. Tommy got the taste of raw hamburger and copper wire in his mouth. The taste of blood. His body’s way of saying shit was about to go down. Like how an old-timer’s leg ached and he’d know rain was coming. The soberest of the South County boys had gotten a better look at Tommy and Geat—jailhouse tats, gorilla hands, bodies built for violence, and eyes that had seen plenty of it—and got his friends to sit the fuck down. Tommy had laughed about it and taken another shot.

  And there it was. That shot had been the one that cut off his mind from his senses. What happened after that might as well have happened to another person. A lot of Tommy’s life was like that.

  He popped aspirin, stuck his face to the kitchen faucet to wash them down. He gulped water. His throat burned. His tonsils were stomach-juice fried. He must have puked sometime when he’d been floating pilotless. He smoked a stove-lit cigarette hard, like it had the cure in it. He checked the fridge for the last beer, the one he knew he’d already drunk.

  Tommy’s cell phone showed a dozen missed calls from Geat. He felt hangover panic like jolts of electricity through his chest. Tommy hit redial. A lump of cigarette scum sat heavy in his throat.

  “Hey there, motherfucker.” Geat’s hillbilly twang got thicker when he was pissed. “A day late and a dollar short in the callback department.”

  “Look—”

  “That was a hell of a way to leave a man hanging. After you split on me,” Geat said, “those South County boys got their mettle back. Five-on-one and all.”

  “I split on you?”

  “Yeah, man. I went out lookin’ for you and they followed. Shit, I had to break some son of a bitch’s arm to get them off me. Still got stomped pretty good.”

  “Where you at?” Tommy asked. “We’ve got a job to do.”

  “Ain’t you got some nerve,” Geat said. “I’m back home now. I got the fuck out of St. Louis. Drunker’n hell, but I made it.”

  The silence was loud. Geat was the one who broke it.

  “What happened to you, man? You used to be class.”

  He hung up. Tommy held the phone to his ear for a long second. Then he went looking for that phantom beer again.

  The air felt hot and wet as dog’s breath. Tommy kept the windows down. He drove downtown. Tried to sweat the poison out. Fought down the thing in his head that didn’t want to think about the mess he’d put himself in. No Geat meant he’d blown the deal. It meant telling Lambert that he’d fucked up. Stomach acid brewed at the thought of it: Lambert with his eyes that never changed no matter what his face did. But Tommy had no choice. He had to come clean to Lambert, tell him he fucked up and needed another man.

  His left arm ached. His fingertips soda-pop tingled. His breath drew hard. Classic heart-attack symptoms. Classic bullshit. His brain just gave him the signs of one sometimes on days like today. When he was half-poisoned with a fuckup hanging over him. When the real thing came he would most likely ignore it, thinking it was just his brain fucking with him again.

  He turned onto Dirtnap Avenue. The street signs called it Napoleon Avenue. The street signs were wrong. This was Dirtnap. Redbrick skeletons and fizzled-out streetlights. Gang graffiti and broken windows. Don’t walk in the alleys unless you like getting drunk-rolled. A sign written in Nikki’s hand had been stapled to the door of the Pickled Punk: DO NOT PARK ON SIDE STREETS. YOUR CAR WILL BE STOLEN. The sidewalks sparkled with broken safety glass. The kids around here loved stolos—stolen cars boosted for the pure demon fun of it.

  Tommy opened the door to the bar. The stench of spilled beers and cigarettes rushed out to meet him. Five red-topped barstools and an Old Style sign above the bar. The stickers of a thousand dead bands papered the walls. Tommy slid onto a barstool. Nikki worked the bar. She still looked good to Tommy. Wet eyes, slick with life and the brains behind them. Hair, black and shining with one gray streak, poured down past her shoulders. Tits just starting to sag—but just enough to make them feel real when you took them in your hands.

  It’d been years since he’d been able to do that.

  Tommy and Nikki had been all fireworks—Roman candles pointed at each other’s faces. They had raged. Lived hard, drank hard, fucked hard, fought hard. He needed the fireworks for the heat they gave him. Everything else in his life felt cold. But things changed, the way they do. He drank more, drank alone more. They fought more, fucked less. She loaned him money when things got slow with Lambert. He never paid her back. Neither said the thing: his end of the seesaw went down, hers went up. The rest of it was white noise. So it ended. A few years passed. They found their truce as bartender and regular. Old friends. But never that other, better thing.

  “Where’s your friend?” she asked now. Thoughts of Geat brought acid up the back of his throat. Refried his tonsils. Made him thirsty.

  “Vodka. Double.” Odorless vodka. The secret drinker’s best friend.

  “At least say ‘tonic’ for me, Tommy.”

  “Sure. Tonic, why not?”

  She gave him the drink. He pushed back a twenty. He made himself wait. She turned her back to him. Then he picked up the drink. He took it down fast. It ran cold-hot down his throat. Warm numbness spread. He opened his eyes to see her watching in the mirror behind the bar.

  Lambert’s place down the road from the Pickled Punk had been a bar once itself. The Black Goat. Brains and eggs specialty of the house. Now it wasn’t really a bar. It was a lair. Still fully stocked with booze. Just missing customers.

  Lambert and Meadows sat at the single table in the middle of the room. Tommy came in to the sound of their laughter. Meadows laughed with his whole body. Crooked-tooth grin. Lambert laughed every place but his eyes. Icebox cold. Nikki had joked that Lambert needed Meadows there to remind him of what humanity was like.

  “Sorry, man,” Meadows said as Tommy sat down, “but I got to tell you, you look about half dead.”

  “Just half dead?” Tommy said. “Guess I still have work to do.”

  No laugh.

  “Where’s Geat?” Lambert asked.

  “Running late,” Tommy said. He hadn’t planned on lying, he lied to himself. “He found himself a little something-something last night, and I guess he’s putting her through the paces. I’m going to get him on the way to Little Bosnia.”

  Lambert just looked at him. Those fucking eyes. Like he fucking knew. But he didn’t know.

  “You know Geat,” Tommy said. “He’s a pro. We’re all good.”

  “Need a piece?” Meadows asked.

  “In the glove compartment.” Another lie. His nine-millimeter sat in his sock drawer. He’d forgotten it. A stupid lie. Meadows would have a gun. Hell, if Tommy came clean now, Lambert would probably send Meadows with him. All he had to do was say it.

  He didn’t say a thing. He let the moment pass.
Lambert pushed the duffel bag over to him. It was done. Tommy sipped the whiskey before he left. He didn’t gulp.

  Well, maybe a little at the end.

  Tommy hit Little Bosnia. The cash rode shotgun. Storefront signs turned from English to symbol salad.

  Tommy pulled into the lot behind the restaurant, pushing his huge truck between two tiny Japanese sports cars lowered until they would scrape speed bumps. He looked to the shotgun seat. The duffel bag where Geat ought to be. The gunless glove box. He thought about driving away. Seeing how far that bag of cash could get him.

  But he knew the answer. Not far enough.

  He got out of the car and walked into the restaurant.

  Families everywhere. Children ran between tables. Mounds of ash heaped in the ashtrays. Bottles bumped into plates of sausages and fried things. Parents shouted at the children. They shouted at each other. They shouted at the air itself.

  The bar sat in back. Men in cheap-looking black suits. Smoking, drinking. A man in a bright yellow suit behind the bar. He smoked two cigarettes at once. He had scars on his face from some batshit Eastern European madness from whatever the fuck went down back there. Tommy knew him as Balic. He was the Man in Little Bosnia.

  The men in black suits eyed Tommy as he slid up to the bar. Tommy held the duffel bag between his knees. Anyone making a move would have to come through him to get it.

  “Hey,” Tommy said.

  Balic flashed brown teeth. A dog’s threat as much as a grin.

  “Hello, my friend!” he said, lifting a glass of blush liquor at Tommy. “Welcome.”

  “You know why I’m here.”

  “Yes,” Balic said. “And you will wait.”

  “That’s what you got to say, huh?”

  Balic poured two shots of the blush liquor into highball glasses and pushed one toward Tommy. Tommy downed it and wiped his mouth. Some kind of fruit brandy. It burned like heavy fuel. Like one hundred proof. Balic waved at the crowd of families.

  “You are early, is all. The merchandise is not yet here. We don’t do business during business hours, you see? You will have a drink and wait.”

  The glass of liquor filled in front of Tommy. He drank it. The bottle sat next to his right hand. He poured himself another. Lit a cigarette. He felt that thirst. The one that grew the more he drank. He gave it what it wanted. Plenty. It tasted like burning fruit. Copper wire.

  One by one the families left. The men smoked and talked. They told jokes. They started telling them in English for Tommy’s sake. The jokes had two idiots in them, Mujo and Suljo.

  One of the men knew how to tell a joke. He’s got one for Tommy, he said. Mujo and Suljo are walking home to their village after a raid by the Serbs. They find a head by the side of the road. Mujo looks at it and says, I think this is our old friend Naser. No, can’t be, says Suljo. Mujo picks up the head and shows it to Suljo. Look at it, he says, this is certainly our old friend Naser. Impossible, says Suljo. Why is it impossible, Mujo asks. Suljo points at the head and says, Because Naser is much taller than that!

  The men laughed. Tommy laughed. He leaned back. An arm wrapped around his throat. He had just enough time to wonder why they just didn’t put a bullet through his brain. The arm around his throat squeezed. Nothingness bloomed at the edges of his eyes. He planted his feet against the bar. Pushed. The man choking him came down with him. They hit the floor. It seemed like Tommy should have felt something.

  Tommy wrapped his hands around the duffel bag straps. The animal inside him said, Run. He tried to scramble to his feet. The men grabbed him. Hands from behind pulled him up. Balic put his face inches from Tommy’s.

  “I have a message to send to Lambert,” he said. “Give me that bag and you can give the message with your mouth. Do not give it to me and I will write the message on you.”

  “Fuck you,” Tommy said. It felt good to say. He rolled his shoulders. The men holding his arms struggled to keep hold. Balic hit him in the stomach. Tommy puked air. Dropped. He didn’t feel anything. His lungs refused to start up again. Balic stomped his head. The world blinked out.

  It blinked back in. Three men left in the room. Balic and two of the black suits. The two men in black held his arms to the ground. Balic grabbed a vodka bottle. Broke it on Tommy’s forehead. Bloody vodka splashing down into his eyes. Little rivers plugged his nose. Balic stomped him. And again. Something cracked. Tommy didn’t feel any of it.

  Tommy turned his head and watched the blood pool below his face. Black and spreading. Hands turned his face back to the ceiling. Balic stood over him with a knife. He pushed the knife into Tommy’s stomach. His body jittered. It knew it was being gutted. But Tommy didn’t feel it. Vodka and blood and blackness and Tommy all mixed together, like he was the world and he was drowning in himself.

  He gasped like breaking the surface of a lake. He roared. Balic stood over him, still working with the knife. The pain of it all rushed into him. He drove his boot into the fork of Balic’s crotch. Balic dropped. He left the knife hilt-deep in Tommy.

  Slick with blood. Tommy took a punch in the face from one of the men holding his arms. His head hit the floor. His teeth clicked through the tip of his tongue. His hands went to his stomach. Found the knife there. One of the black-suit men tried to wrestle him back down. Tommy stabbed strobe-light fast. Hit something major. Now the blood wasn’t just his.

  Tommy moved toward Balic. His feet went spastic. He caught himself on a barstool. He looked down. So much blood coming out of him. More black than red. Dark with life like soil.

  The still-standing man in black tried scrambling over the bar to get away from Tommy. Tommy grabbed him by the ankle with his left hand. With the knife in the other, he opened the man’s leg to the bone. The man screamed. Tommy laughed and yanked the man down to the floor with his friend.

  Balic reached for his gun. Tommy got to him first. He laughed and lunged. Butted him with a bloody forehead. Balic went slack. Tommy turned Balic over onto his back. Tommy hung his face over Balic’s so his blood dripped like rain.

  “I’ve got your knife, friend,” Tommy told him. “Let me give it back to you.”

  Tommy gave it back. And again. It had been a while since Tommy had done any work with a knife, but the way of it came back to him quick enough.

  Things Tommy will never remember.

  Tommy drives through gray mist, like fog had rolled in from the Mississippi and buried the city. Blood soaking him everywhere, down to his sodden socks.

  He walks through the door of the Black Goat holding a heavy wet load.

  Tommy lies on the floor of the Black Goat. Blood trailing from the back door. Meadows turns him over. Meadows sees that the messy thing he held in his arms is his guts, slipping through the gash in his stomach. Meadows carries him to the Black Goat’s unused kitchen. Lambert asks him questions about money. About Geat. Tommy laughs pink foam.

  There is a man elbow-deep in Tommy. Some doctor Lambert owns. He works Tommy’s intestines with both hands. Shoves them back inside Tommy, hard, like a man overloading a washing machine.

  Tommy woke up to a pain he’d never known before. Meadows and Lambert stood in the kitchen of Lambert’s place. The never-used kitchen of the Black Goat. He wore his stinking jeans and a black T-shirt. He had an IV in his arm. Someone had gotten him a pillow. Probably Meadows.

  “Is Geat dead?” Lambert asked.

  Tommy ground teeth. The pain swelled from rivers to an ocean in him. The pain felt bigger than he was.

  “He wasn’t with me. He’s back home.”

  “I know,” Lambert said. “I talked to Geat.”

  Meadows started to ask, “Then why—”

  “To see if he’d lie to me again,” Lambert said.

  Tommy told them what he could. About leaving his gun. About the attack. He thought he’d feel better once he told the truth. That’s how it was sometimes in stories. People unburdened themselves of all the lies and they felt clean and whole again. Tommy didn’t feel that way. He
felt like a man who had needed to vomit and now had a lap full of puke.

  “The doctor left some pills,” Meadows said. He held forward a couple of blue capsules. “For the pain.”

  “No thanks,” he told Meadows.

  “You’ve got to take something,” Meadows said.

  His death had been so near him in Little Bosnia that he could still smell its stink. It smelled like gasoline, like hydrogen peroxide, something clear and pure and overwhelming. He’d run toward nothingness every night for the last twenty years. But when he’d seen it staring back at him from the inside of his guts . . .

  He needed the pain. He needed to know he could take it.

  Tommy took the pills. Lambert watched him. Tommy popped the pills under his tongue and held them there. He felt the capsules go sticky under his tongue. He fake-gulped. Lambert turned away. Tommy spit the pills out. He slid them under his pillow.

  “Just one thing I want to know,” Lambert said. “If you wanted to die so goddamn bad, why the hell did you fight them?”

  The pain had colors. Red at the crevice of the cut where the steel staples pulled his torn flesh together and forced it to knit. The pain that spread around his body was yellow-brown, the color of old banana or Balic’s rotting tooth. The colors washed over him. He opened his eyes and the colors went away, but the pain did not.

  That night. Three in the morning. A summer storm roared against the building. Tommy’s moans came out of his throat like solid things. He tried to ride it out. He tried to take it all. He broke.

  He pushed his hand under the pillow (and that motion set upon him a new wave of pain, oh Christ) for the painkillers he’d stuck there. He lifted his head (stomach muscles contracted, sweet Jesus). Searched under his pillow with a blind hand. The pills were gone. Maybe on the floor somewhere.

  The bar in the next room. He could see the bottles through the wall with Superman eyes. Three rows of everything. Single-malt scotch with caramel color and the memory of oak. Smooth Irish whiskey. Corn-sweet bourbon, the city-slicker brother to rocket-fuel moonshine. Vodkas with frosted bottles and fancy names. Sweet toxic-green Midori and ghost-pale ouzo. Vermouth, on the rocks like Hemingway. Gin, juniper scented, medicinal. Cognac, with an amber glow and fumes that burned the eyes. Chase it all down with a beer: pale gold Budweiser, St. Louis original from the keg, Guinness, pop-top Old Style and Pabst, brown Anchor Steam. Pissy Corona cut with lime juice. He’d drunk them all, knew them, knew they could kill this.