Nausea

by Kurtz, Ed

  NAUSEA

  Ed Kurtz

  First Edition

  Nausea © 2016 by Ed Kurtz

  All Rights Reserved.

  A DarkFuse Release

  www.darkfuse.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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  OTHER BOOKS BY AUTHOR

  Angel of the Abyss

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  1. LUCKY AND SPOT

  “When the day is done

  Hope so much your race will be all run

  Then you find you jumped the gun

  Have to go back where you begun

  When the day is done.”

  —Nick Drake, “Day is Done”

  Turned out to be a messy one.

  Nick hadn’t expected it. Figured on it being clean and simple, but the dumb son of a bitch put up a fight. Next thing, what was supposed to be a garrote job ended up fists and a bad curb stomp.

  Ugly.

  Nick was shaking all over when it was done, took stock of the scene and frowned at his ruined suit. The guy on the ground was worse off, naturally. His jawbone lay flat in a straight flush with the top half of his face. Nick looked away in a hurry, scanned the immediate area for the best place to toss his cookies. Being as he was standing behind a warehouse last used when Nixon was in office, he decided anyplace would do.

  He climbed down from the crumbling loading dock and bent at the waist, thrusting his face at the aromatic weeds springing up all around his feet. Paused in this compromising tableau, he waited for his stomach to roil, for the warm remains of his breakfast to launch out of him. It came faster than he expected, lurching up and out like a geyser, blocking his airway and temporarily blinding him with tears.

  The freeway roared dully in the middle distance. Nick caught sight of a campfire’s remains a few yards off, figured it was a hobo camp. Hoboes didn’t like to talk to cops, which was good. He shook his head, forced himself to gag some more. Nothing else came.

  He couldn’t recall the last time he puked.

  Straightening up, Nick shuffled back to the loading dock, leaned against the cracked cement, lighted a Pall Mall. The sickness was unexpected, that was all. Nothing to worry about. Probably not even related to the job—bad eggs, he reckoned. He’d finish his smoke, dust himself off, get the hell out of there. Just like always.

  A few minutes later he ground the butt under the heel of his boot and narrowed his eyes at the purplish ribbon of the gathering dusk. The air was getting a bit nippy now that summer had ended; even this far from town he could smell woodsmoke. It was an old, familiar smell, a comforting one. He gazed at the shooting stars made by the headlights of the semis on the freeway and wished he could vomit again.

  Behind and just above him, on the dock’s decrepit landing, the guy remained sprawled out the way Nick left him. His name was Lou something-or-other, a Polish-sounding name or maybe Czech, and the only other thing about him Nick knew was he’d been slipping it to his administrative assistant who happened to have a husband who didn’t take too kindly to the news. Or at least that was what Nick gathered from the guy’s desperate rambling near the end. It wasn’t the first cuckold Nick ever worked, and if experience was worth anything, he guessed the unhappy couple would end up split in the short-run anyway—he’d even told the cat as much, and went on to explain he wouldn’t do the wife when the time came, he didn’t play both sides like that.

  “You’re going to have to get another man,” he’d have said, if he ever had any contact with the clients, “and they don’t come cheaper than me, so you’ll want to cash in that 401(k).”

  Naturally the guy would get all jumpy about it, try to laugh it off. His hands shaking when he passed over the manila envelope with the bread for the job. Another stupid shit figured he could cure infidelity by taking out a hit on the lothario schtupping his old lady. It would make no difference to Nick. He’d take the paper. But it didn’t work that way. All Nick got was enough to find his mark, and scoped good old Lou something-or-other’s pad that night. Had him out cold in the trunk of the Benz before lunch the next day and off to the warehouse they went. Now he had five grand coming into his account to show for a ruined suit, a black eye and a pair of Testonis absolutely awash with the asshole’s blood. If he’d known the hit was on goddamn Smokin’ Joe Frazier, he’d have planned for it. But that’s what you get when you don’t ask too many questions.

  Still, he imagined there weren’t too many assholes so lucky as Lou to get stomped to death by a pair of fifteen-hundred-dollar shoes.

  Messy as hell.

  Nick rolled his shoulders, sucked in a deep lungful of cool, smoky night air. He jabbed two fingers into his mouth, index and middle, and touched the soft palate there, tickled it. Oldest trick in the book, it worked on almost anybody.

  It didn’t work for Nick. He gagged a little, did the whole dry-retching routine, but that was the extent of it. He wiped the fingers on the leg of his trousers and blinked his watery eyes. There was no two ways about it—he wasn’t getting sick again, no matter how bad his stomach roiled.

  Bad eggs, he told himself again.

  He walked a few paces away from the dock, pivoted on a seven-hundred-and-fifty-dollar heel, looked up at poor old Lou.

  “Sorry, Lou,” he said.

  He swallowed the spit in his mouth and climbed back up to drag the body down before retrieving the shovel from his trunk.

  * * *

  There were two names that shone brightly in Nick’s memory as big firsts: Diana Gonzalez and Joe Motal. Diana was a rosy-cheeked Mexican girl in Nick’s tenth-grade English class who surprised him after the homecoming dance by luring him into the backseat of her tio’s Plymouth and bestowing upon him the most astonishing ninety seconds of his life up to that point. His first lay. He was fifteen.

  Five years and a moderate but impressive array of lays later, Nick encountered First Number Two. Like most good stories of a man’s youthful adventures and indiscretions, it began with a girl.

  * * *

  Her name was Misty Thorne, she was five ten in her stocking feet, mouse-brown hair that shined like oil and eyes forever loaded with private introspection. Nick was twenty; Misty twenty-six. The older woman, he sometimes fondly recalled, the siren that led him crashing upon the rocks. He was slightly more experienced than he’d been that night groping blindly in the back of Tio Gonzalez’s car, but there remained much to learn and Misty was a more than adequate teacher. Up until Misty it’d been missionary all the way, and until her that suited Nick just fine. But Misty had a bag of tricks with no apparent bottom, an encyclopedic knowledge of games and positions and sensory experiences Nick hadn’t dreamed of. She was a kind of animal and animal trainer both, her greatest skill the effortless ability to denude him of the stifling strictures of civility, for which she had no patience at all in the bedroom. The first time she slipped a middle finger into his rectum he nearly collapsed from a coronary. Within a week he discovered to his astonishment that he was disappointed when she kept her explora
tory digits to herself.

  He was hustling frat boys at Slick’s when he met her, playing naïve and losing miserably to the inferior players until they were sure they had him for all he was worth. It was good money in the late summer when the new batch flooded in and Nick made the most of it, knowing damn well his luck would run out as soon as his con became evident. He was six hundred to the good on a bumping Friday night when a flat-topped mountain in a Detroit Lions jacket got mad about a two rails reverse shot that wasn’t much more than showing off and landed an openhanded slap across the side of Nick’s head. Nick went down, but he jabbed the fat end of his cue like a joust and smashed the monster’s left eye. Next thing a half-empty bottle of Heineken exploded over the crown of his skull and he was dragged out the back door by his arms while the mountain pressed a hand to his bloody eye and wailed like a mourning Greek.

  They all looked more or less the same in the dim light of Slick’s backroom, more so in the near pitch alley that separated the bar from the shuttered florist’s next door. Stocky and lantern-jawed and quite civilly taking turns as they kicked the living shit of him down there on the cement. (“After you”; “No, please, I insist,” he later reimagined the scene with a bitter laugh.) They cracked a rib, outright broke another. Stamped a thumb and wrenched it out of place. He lost a bicuspid that would have left a conspicuous gap in his smile if he ever smiled, took three years before he got around to having a crown put in. An errant sneaker found his ear and the alley got bright for an instant. As the sparkling light dissolved he felt a hand worm into one pocket and then another, divesting him of all his ill-gotten gains.

  He never did see the mountain again, but he liked to think the son of a bitch lost that eye.

  After a while and a lot of disinterested passersby, someone finally paused long enough to inquire after Nick’s well-being, one of those nosy Yankee-type ladies whose busybodiness finally proved useful for something. A quarter of an hour later a pair of grumbling paramedics tossed him into the back of an ambulance and deposited him at Breckenridge Hospital, where he was patched up, doped up, and kicked out with pockets as empty as his prospects. Right then and there Nick met his brown-haired, black-eyed savior.

  She was waiting down at the end of the sidewalk, watching the traffic with anxious eyes. Her left arm was in a sling and there were stitches in her cheek. When a yellow top light appeared among the herky-jerky throng of steel and glass, she threw her good arm in the air and stepped off the curb. Nick watched with limited interest until her heel slipped on the curve of the curb and she went tumbling into the street.

  Nick fell into a dash. His ribs ached and his head swam but he kept moving until he’d grabbed a fistful of her downy coat and heaved her back up to the sidewalk. She screamed bloody murder.

  “Don’t touch me! Get off, you son of a bitch!”

  So much for chivalry.

  * * *

  The only trouble with a fresh grave was how goddamn fresh it looked—you could spot one half a mile away if you knew what to look for. It was for this reason that Nick buried Lou directly beneath the dilapidated loading dock. As soon as he patted down the soil with the flat of the shovel, he climbed the crumbling steps and set to breaking off chunks of concrete and pushing them down over the grave. Looked as natural as though time had done all the damage, just another example of middle-American industrial decay.

  Five large, he reminded himself. Minus a new suit and shoe repair.

  His stomach jumped again.

  He didn’t feed himself the line about the eggs this time.

  Nick tossed the shovel back in the trunk, slammed it shut, climbed in behind the wheel. Cranked the engine to life, but left the headlamps off. He had one hand on the wheel and the other drifted to his belly.

  Fucking nerves, Nicky?

  “I just need something to eat,” he said aloud, glancing in the rearview mirror at his own eyes. They stared back at him, narrowed and vaguely accusatory.

  Nick jerked the transmission into gear and rolled slowly over the eroded dirt road, only switching on the lights when he reached the access road. Night came on quick and the grabbing yellow lights that stabbed out in pairs from every approaching car, truck, and semi irritated him to no end. He merged onto the freeway, switched on the radio. It was doo-wop all the way to the Howard Johnson’s just off Exit 24.

  * * *

  “Settle,” Nick said, scuttling back like a startled crustacean. “I just pulled you out of the street, that’s all.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “Glad you’re all right.”

  “Do I look all right to you?”

  She raised her broken wing, gestured at it with her chin. Her eyes were wide, wild. The one with the shiner looked mean.

  “Well,” Nick said, trailing off as he stared dumbly at the cars idling at the red light. “Have a good night, anyway.”

  “Yeah,” she groused. She planted a nylon-stockinged knee on the sidewalk and hefted herself up. Her purse slipped from her shoulder, dangled from her elbow. She didn’t seem to notice.

  Nick gave a weak nod and headed back the other way. It was a long walk to the motor court he called home in those days.

  “Hey.”

  He paused, pursed his lips. Turned around, slowly, like he was getting mugged. She just stood there, the purse still swaying from her elbow, her knees turned in at each other. He noticed she’d broken the one heel, so her stance was all catawampus.

  She said, “Get me the hell outta here, would you?”

  Nick knitted his brow, glanced back at the gridlock. He raised a hand and shouted for the first hack he saw.

  * * *

  “Sorry about the fare,” he said with genuine contrition.

  “That’s all right. I’d have had to pay it without you along.”

  “I guess so.”

  They stood in a largely vacant parking lot, the macadam old and run through with breaks like nervous systems. Dandelions sprouted from the cracks. It was here that the cab dropped them off, per her instructions—LANAI APARTMENTS, according to the chipped and fading sign facing the street.

  “What’s a lanai?” he asked, eyeballing the sign.

  “Like a veranda.”

  He turned back toward the building, which was nothing more than an old motor court a lot like the one he called home, only repurposed for more long-term living. Nary a veranda in sight.

  “Might as well come up,” she said in a hopeless sort of way.

  She made for a flight of metal steps leading to the second level. They didn’t much look like they could take the weight, and she didn’t look like she weighed more than a buck and a quarter at most. Nick followed, and they both reached the landing of the second level without incident. She stepped gingerly over a plastic toy bulldozer and he tripped over it, barely regaining his footing before taking a tumble.

  “Careful, now,” she said.

  Her place was the last door at the end of the mezzanine, number 6B. The second to last, 5B, was lit up inside and blaring rap music.

  “Must get old,” Nick commented as she jammed a key into the lock. She shrugged, opened the door. Went inside. Nick followed.

  The place was musty but clean. Her furnishings were Spartan: just a pink loveseat and a wicker stool. There was no television and the walls were bare. She dropped her keys on the short kitchen counter and pulled a pair of clinking bottles from the half-sized fridge.

  “Beer?”

  “Sure.”

  She cracked them open with a rusty-looking bottle opener that was screwed into the wall and painted over. Nick sat on the loveseat and she sat beside him. They sipped their beers quietly. The pounding bass from next door rattled Nick’s skull.

  “Misty,” she said matter-of-factly after a while.

  “What?”

  “My name, I figured you’d want to know it.”

  “Oh.”

  Sip. Thump, thump, thump. Sip.

  “You got one?”

  “Got one wh
at?”

  “A name.”

  “Sure, of course.”

  “You want me to guess?”

  Nick smiled, his cheeks a little red. “Nah. It’s Nick.”

  “Woulda guessed Pete. Not sure why.”

  Nick shrugged.

  “Anyone ever call you Nicky?” she asked.

  “Not to my face.”

  “You want another beer? I’m having one.”

  He glanced at her bottle, which was drained to the last. His was still three-quarters full. He nodded, and as she rose to go back to the fridge he chugged what remained in three enormous gulps. He was gasping when she came back, just one bottle in her hand.

  “You okay?”

  “Fine.”

  “Only got the one left,” she said, handing it over.

  “We’ll split it, then.”

  Misty smiled. Her eyes smiled, too, so he knew it was genuine.

  She drew a long gulp from the bottle and swallowed as she passed it to Nick. He followed suit, savoring what tasted like piss a few minutes earlier but seemed like champagne now. The bottle was empty in no time at all. Nick patted the cushion beside him. Misty wiggled out of her jacket, careful not to jostle her slinged arm, and walked coyly out of the room. She disappeared into the single room in the back.

  Nick rose, narrowed his eyes, and went after her.

  * * *

  Though the eggs were much too runny the toast went down all right and Nick was mostly content to simply drink cup after cup of coffee and smoke one Pall Mall after another. The waitress—a down-home sort of middle-aged woman with a brown bouffant and a name tag that read LORETTA—came by to warm up his coffee every ten minutes or so and otherwise let him alone. The only words she uttered to him, apart from taking his initial order, came the second time she emptied his ashtray. She asked if he was all right. He didn’t answer, largely because he didn’t know.