by Diane Munier
And his old man—the beatings, with the rod, his fist, his open hand, the belt, the cane—and the dirty, dirty feel of it inside that he’d buried.
The rage those three had brought back when they’d pointed their weapons at him…after all he’d been through, after getting so close…after being in love… they held life and death in their hands…his life…his death.
Redver knew Cabhan. They were fighting. The betrayal.
“Hero,” he heard his name, and they went wild then, and his arm was lifted, hoo-rah, hoo-ray, and he stepped in the middle. He remembered where everything was as Potato Two stepped close and glared in his face, garlic somewhere like this moog had rubbed his mug with it. He remembered the room, cause he planned to use the whole thing, even the crowd, whatever it took.
The time for thinking was over. It was just him and this ox, no more human than taties sizzling in grease…with the cabbage.
He kept moving. His father wouldn’t allow it. Part of his submission in taking the punishment was standing still, completely still, awaiting his fate. Like now. Like this.
He let his feet dance around some, move around this moog. He heard Audie’s big mouth: “Breathe, you chimp fooker.”
And he let his lungs open, and some air rushed in.
“Settle down!” Baboon called out.
And he breathed, and he did…settle…for nothing.
The crowd went away, and there was just this potato—needing mashed—needed shredded. It was all…his…fault. This moog.
He jabbed and got past the big gates. Blood spurted from the guy’s nose.
His ears roared, and he felt the numbness leave his legs. He was here now, all here.
Potato came in swinging. Jules blocked some, and Audie yelled that he should breathe again. He had to remember that.
Jules jabbed him hard, right in the nose. The crowd yelled like crazy, but the fooker didn’t go down. Potato had blood pouring into his mouth. So Jules had the warm slick sick of this moog’s blood all over his fists. If victory had a color, it was red.
He had that brick wall, the crowd parting as he drove Potato against it, and he hooked him right then left, good solid punches to the jaw, the worst kind. The crowd yelled for Two to get off the wall, and he stepped back so this moog could go to his knees, and Jules socked him side of the head.
Potato fell over like he’d been shot. The crowd’s big voice went up with a kind of release, and Jules opened his mouth to yell with them.
That’s when he heard the whistle.
He turned toward the sound and people ran past, and he was jostled and shoved. He tried to stand his ground, but he got pushed into the mick on the floor. He stumbled over that bum until his shoulders hit the wall, and still they were running.
He remembered the money and Redver. He saw him then, Clark Blaise, blowing the whistle again.
“Round ’em up, round ’em up!” Blaise was yelling, like that.
They were busted.
Chapter 29
He didn’t like closed-in places—jail cells, closets, tanks, jail cells, coffins, and jail cells.
He didn’t like a lack of choice. Who did? Not him—his green shorts and his work boots and his tattoos and the close mill of twenty-five unhappy souls and the smell and the arguing and the foul mood that settled like a cloud of gas and choked the hope and dreams right out of them. He was a full-fledged monkey now, taken right out of the trees and stuck in the zoo.
Audie wanted to talk about Blaise’s ear, even in the paddy wagon, especially there—did Jules see the bandage on that moog’s ear? Or the place where an ear should go—bandaged? Isbe’s own father. Shit! What if—shit!
“Maybe he tried to get an earring, you know, like the gypsies we seen over there?” Audie finally said, and laughed. Or tried to.
But Jules hadn’t laughed. He wasn’t laughing now. Clark belonged to Cabhan.
This was a cage. “You don’t need more room than this right here,” Audie said to Jules, standing as he was by the bars, looking across the way at the rest of the monkeys no better off than him.
Jules needed to go and keep going and going. He needed to move; that’s all. Being locked up dug into him like a spoon going for a scoop of his heart, and another, and another, until it was gone and in its place the hollow, filling up with liquid—the big shaking swim of bloody nothing.
Now he did remember the closet, his father walking away and the water bugs running over his legs and up his arms in the dark. The knowing…he was alone, and Ma gone was all his fault.
He wished he could tell the younger him—kick the door down, buddy, then drive a fork in that bastard’s eye. You’ll be okay—if you keep moving.
And inside the tank, the other Buick, the airless feel, sardine in a tin can waiting for the hammer’s blow. He rode across Europe in the half-track, or he walked… so he could breathe.
“I want out,” he’d dared to say, to Audie. Then he laughed cause they were two men in green skivvies, locked with these moogs, some wearing suits, all of them pissed and hit hard in the wallet.
They all wanted out.
But him…none so much as him.
He fingered the clover through his waistband. One piece seemed ready to break off.
Uncle Cabhan wasn’t here. Not him nor one of his. Not Redver, not Seth, but across the way—two in the blue—the icebox and Bobby’s illustrious opponent. Jules knew Potato Two wasn’t moving when he was hauled away.
And the orangutan, Jerry Blake. He stared at that one when he could get a clear shot cause pup hadn’t left the corner where his legs were bent, arms around them, and he rocked, head on his knees.
It calmed Jules some to think that kid was as miserable as him.
“Hell of a fight, hell of a fight,” they said to Audie and him, the others in here, and Audie started to taunt those other two across the way, the ones wearing blue.
“Hey, where’s your pants, you bums? Where’s your pants?” he said again and again.
“Do I have to beat you again? What you lookin’ at? What you grinnin’ at, jack-o-lantern?”
It got the men in their cell and even the one across the way laughing. Jules didn’t feel a part of it; didn’t feel present.
He wanted out, and his stomach quivered as he hung his hands through the bars. He’d gone over his steps since the robbery at Lou’s, Blaise there, the moog who’d brought him home.
He’d called Audie and gone to see if Lou was alive, then straight back to Lou’s shop to get the dough. Back in his room counting the dough, Isbe came. The kid Jerry with her. He hitched that ride and passed the night at Redver’s, got back to his room late morning and Audie was waiting, antsy as a rabbit cause that ear…and then the fight. They’d had the fight…
But right before—Redver and Cabhan arguing.
The sins of the fathers, always that. He’d thought he’d paid enough for those, but what was enough?
Isbe Blaise. No, it would kill him to think of her now, though he was never not thinking of her. If she saw him, as he was…if she knew…
Her old man…
Speak of the devil—Clark Blaise was before him, in the flesh, right there, bandage on his ear seeping red. Smoking down that Camel, a nice green beneath his tan. Blaise gave Jules a cigarette, lit it for him, and other guys were there asking…monkeys, wanting that first puff, then the next…and a phone call, a phone call, a word.
Blaise ignored everyone but Jules. He stepped back and another copper opened the cage, and Blaise motioned for Jules to come out. Audie came forward, and they pushed him back and closed the door. “Hey—he out? You gettin’ out, Jules? Hey, copper, he out?”
Jules looked back at Gorilla, and Blaise pushed him forward, and they went to a small room, table and chairs. And two came in beside Blaise, and one hit Jules solid with the end of his stick, right in the breadbasket, and knocked his air out because he’d barely had time to tense his stomach. Shit.
He was bent over, hand on the table to keep
himself on his feet. He could almost hear Audie telling him to breathe. Well, he was trying.
“Hero,” Blaise said when Jules straightened. Jules had dropped his smoke and motioned for permission to get it. If not for Isbe, this would be his move, when he’d go for Blaise and get some good licks in before they restrained him and beat the shit out of him. Or tried.
But he picked up his smoke instead, straightened, and Clark motioned he should sit in a chair.
His men stood ready to do Blaise’s bidding. “Trouble-maker. Law-breaker,” Blaise said, his back straight, his thumb hooked in his belt. “I’m starting to wonder, company you keep.”
“Nice earmuff,” Jules said, the cigarette hanging from his lip. One hand on his stomach, the other still on the table.
They stared at one another. Isbe got her beautiful eyes from this sludge pile. Talk about a silk purse from a sow’s ear. He should say that. But not her name. He couldn’t say her name to this mother fooker.
“You think this is funny?” Blaise pointed to the ear that no longer was.
He hadn’t been laughing that he knew of, but now he was. He laughed, like usual. He’d tried not to—once—and this particular laugh, you couldn’t shut it down.
He laughed, and he got the stick between his shoulders, and once he could breathe, that damn laugh was back.
He looked at Blaise. He didn’t hate. He didn’t. Except for where this moog had failed Isbe. He hated him for that. He hated himself the same way. But this thing here? It was funny. Funnier still if he punched him on that muff.
“If,” Jules tried to say, wishing Audie could hear this, or Baboon. Baboon would love this—“if we’d known…we…” and he had to stop here, cause the laugh, it took him over for a few seconds, and he wiped off tears, and he said, “we wouldn’t of thrown it out the window.” He about collapsed then, and that no-good hit him with the stick on his shoulder, and Jules grabbed it then and ripped it out of his hand, and the other one got on him, and Blaise had his gun.
Jules didn’t fight; he let them drag him to the corner, and he took a couple of kicks to the ribs.
“That’s enough,” Blaise said.
Oh, shit, that hurt. He was panting and holding his side. “Fourth and Killarney is where we threw it…I think. There was a dog…” He laughed like a loon then.
“If it was up to me, I’d of thrown you off the wagon!” Blaise yelled.
Jules had a couple of good replies, but he swallowed them. He wanted to ask Blaise who he took his orders from. But then he knew.
“Go out,” Clark said over his shoulder to the other two. The one glared at Jules, smacking the stick against his palm, walking backward the short distance to the door. They went out.
“You stay the hell away from my daughter,” Blaise said next, his teeth there, beneath that mustache, his teeth like old piano keys clenched with hate.
“Who?”
“You think I wouldn’t know?”
Course he would know.
“Stay away from her or so help me God, I’ll kill you.”
Jules stared. “I can’t agree to that.”
Blaise got in his face, “I ain’t asking. Get out of my town.” He backed off then. “I had my way, you’d be dead already. I see you again, you will be.”
He left Jules in the room then, and Jules looked around for his smoke, but it was done for. He got on his feet and rubbed out the Camel with the toe of his boot. Shit. Heels of his hands in his eyes. Shit.
Stickman came in with some hobo clothes for him to wear. He’d been bailed out, he said.
“What happened to this guy?” Jules asked, motioning toward the pile of clothes, but Stickman ignored him and crossed his arms.
He got on the high-waters and the raggedy shirt and followed the copper to the front office. Audie was there, still in his green pants, but Baboon had given him his shirt and stood there in his undershirt looking unusually sober about things.
“Boo,” Jules said, trying not to look as screwed as he felt. “Hey, what about Blake?”
Baboon shrugged. “Can’t do it.”
Jules said, “How much you got? That punk is going nuts in there.”
Jules and Audie were broke, and Bobby wasn’t much better. He’d had to pay his uncle back the fees for his apprenticeship, he said. He was broke.
“Thanks for getting us out of there,” Jules said.
Bobby almost shook Jules’s hand then, but held off, pulling back his pork chop and wiggling his bitten fingers. Shit.
“I’m fired,” Bobby said, “but he made good on the bail. And the fines. Didn’t wait around.”
“God bless him,” Jules said. “Think he’ll take you back?”
Bobby looked at the floor and shook his head. Then he asked Jules, “They work you over in there?”
“I don’t know.” Jules walked past. He had to get out the door.
Outside he tried to breathe, but his ribs—he couldn’t pull very deep. He wouldn’t stay away from her; no use lying to himself about that. Blaise must have known all along, the spying lowlife. What happened to, “Think about joining the academy?” Where’d that guy go? That fooking liar. He’d said he wanted him thrown off the wagon. And he was going to kill him.
Isbe would choose Jules.
But choosing Jules meant what—some good times at Shiney’s? He had nothing to offer. If she lost her home—if she had to choose—he had nothing to offer…yet…but himself…his kind of love…whatever it was…hard-hearted monkey…bastard love. Right now, he was a loser.
He could lay off a few days, heal up some. That’s if she’d let him. He could move so she couldn’t find him for a while. That might give him time to let things shake out, see what he had left, where to go next if he still had a job even. He could do that. Sleep in back of the shop maybe.
If he could bear to stay away.
Audie and Bobby were behind him. “Hey…put me up a few days?”
Audie shrugged. “Couch is yours.” “What about me?” Bobby asked.
“Floor,” Audie said.
Yeah, that would do—couch, not floor. Or floor. He’d stay away from Isbe, just for a while, until he got to the bottom of it and made sure he wasn’t putting her in harm’s way. All the shit that went down at that fight—and since—and still…and all the fathers and uncles in the shadows pulling the strings.
He’d stay away for a few days. But he should give her something, something big to make it up—all the crap—to let her know he wasn’t running away.
Right now, he had so much to do. The shop and Sal. Redver’s—his money and springing Jerry. He had so much to do before Clark Blaise tried to kill him.
And he fought back.
Yeah, maybe he should tell Isbe, warn her? Tell her what—I may have to kill your dirty old man?
He didn’t want her coming to his building. He just needed a few days to get things sorted. He had to find out what happened to his money. He needed that money, and he needed his job. Clark Blaise—the burgomeister with the missing ear. No one was going to tell him where he had to go.
And who he couldn’t love. He got out of the dark, scary closet years ago, fought his way out, and the closet couldn’t hold him. Hadn’t he said that? Not the closet, not the tank, not the coffin—well, maybe the coffin, but he wasn’t going easy. He wasn’t climbing in for anyone.
Oh…and Uncle Cabhan. It was rotten. He just had to find out how far the rotten went. Then he’d see.
They would see…the boy was a man…the man was a soldier…and a lover…and a killer…and a monkey, one of three, and they were going to make things right in the zoo, where the animals lived.
But right now he was starving. “Come on,” he told the monkeys, Audie still in his green shorts. “I still got credit at the diner.”
Chapter 30
Redver was lying on the kitchen floor in his trailer. If he wasn’t dead, he was out cold.
Jules dropped to his knee beside the older man and worked two fingers against
his pouchy neck. “Still tickin’.”
Bobby righted Redver’s chair, and Audie helped Jules get Redver seated. Jules held on to the man while he came to. Audie reached in his mouth and took the false teeth that hung in there threatening to choke him. Jules about gagged watching Audie do that, and Bobby said, “Oh fooker!”
Audie threw the teeth in the sink and wiped his hand on the front of Redver’s shirt. He ran a glass of water and handed it to Redver. “Thanks,” Redver said. “Where’s your pants?”
“You got some I could borrow?” Audie said.
“Help yourself.” Redver gestured to the back of the trailer.
The old guy didn’t remember much. He was sitting at the table having a drink, waiting for Seth to come in. The door opened with a bang, and before he could turn—that’s all he remembered.
“Jerry’s still in jail,” Jules said.
“Jerry’s truck out there?” Redver asked.
It was not.
Redver gingerly fingered the egg on his head. The monkeys looked at one another.
“You saying it’s all gone?” Audie said.
They waited while Redver slowly raised his head. “You hear me say that?”
Redver reached in his shirt then. He had some folded bills. Two hundred dollars.
He handed this to Jules. “Will you get Jerry out?”
“That’s it, old man?” Audie said back, in some funny-looking overalls.
“Open the cabinet,” Redver said, motioning toward the cabinet under the sink. Since Audie was closest, he did that. There was a board, broken through the middle like a snapped cracker, and a dark hole that showed.
“The bag is in there,” Redver said, and Audie squatted and pulled the bag up.
“Come to Papa,” Audie said. He and Bobby counted eleven thousand.
“He took the winnings,” Redver said, “eight thousand.”
“Seth? You brought in a thief?” Jules said.
“He got the bets placed. He helped double your money. When the police came in…it got him when they charged in like that. Then someone tried to overtake, rob us by Jerry’s truck. Seth knocked him unconscious—or maybe he killed him. But he saved the money. If it wasn’t for Seth…he’s not all bad.”
