Thorn-Field

by James Trettwer

  He has not forgotten the bag-lady. She wore a brown kerchief tied with a bulbous knot under her hairy chin. Her too-small tweed coat, ravaged by seam-rending stretches, enveloped her stumpy bulk. She stopped her disposal-bin excavations and made an open-palm plea. He passed her a fiver, passed on wordless, and opened the spit-stained, bare-metal, alley entrance door to Dark Electronica. Made his way down the twelve steps to the dance floor. The bag lady made him think the black-lit orange arrows pointing down the purple stairwell were glowing reptile slither-prints that had preceded him.

  Now he is immersed in penny-waisted wares of midriff revelations. Short hems and barely-there-butt-covering short pants aglow in burnt-orange and lime-green, all clinging to hard bodies. Head bobbing, smirking, he surveys a bit of girl-on-girl, hip-grinding, deep-kiss action in a semicircle of alpha males. Tight black pants, satiny-smooth white shirts, spiked hair slicked with Axe-endowed contours ripped to perfection. The pack watches the girls. He presses by, receives spiky recognition nods from two alphas. Life is good.

  He moves to the red-neon-washed, crimson marble bar. Slides cool onto a stool.

  “Hello, Joe.”

  “How’s it going, Billy.” Joe’s gravelly voice disperses.

  He and Joe read each other’s lips. “Boilermaker, Joe. Black Label.”

  Joe’s Electronica black-T strains to contain Herculean arms. Billy’s own spiked-to-perfection head nods once. Joe’s stodgy fingers pour with poise. Coors on tap and scotch shot flow in Joe’s magic hands. Apple juice-coloured elixirs proffered to Billy. Beer glass cold, wet, drips condensation, stinging foam passes lips, cools throat. First swallow. Second. He splashes the scotch for a tingling-tangy third swallow. He shivers. Scrumptious. Boilermaker-enhanced, nose-candy delight. Life is very good.

  He toasts Joe. Swings around, leans on the bar. Elbows at countertop ease, beer glass inert between thumb and two fingers, he surveys his people. Tempo decelerates to one-ten beats per minute. Masses cling, swing in digressed rhythmations. He proceeds with his heuristic browse of the female of the species. All hair shoulder-length or longer, ebony or bleached, in ringlets or tightly permed, some cascading down, midriff-exposed, brushing butts that sway. He tingles.

  Slim pickings tonight, though. He parses the clusters of hippie-blondes and trippy black ravens. Catches that one watching him, she quickly glances floorward. Lanky, smooth legs in flat black shoes, black skirt, hem at the knees with revelations of a petite-butt wonder. Dark-brown, straight hair, beige blouse unbuttoned to reveal . . . enough for a runner-up.

  His recursive search reveals she’s with him and he’s with her, and she’s hers, and the knots of males have grown exponentially. Her gaze lingers on his second pass, her head turns away. He determines she is fall-through, else-choice. He downs his ambers, she chats amiably with her friendly cluster. He’s conscious of her struggle to keep her head not-his-way. A nanosecond smirk she does not see and he sets his glass behind him.

  Joe knows the empty glass semaphore and the second set of juices is already ready. He reprises his two swallows, splash, third swallow, sees her glance once again his way. He smiles. Spontaneous wave turns to hair-tugging exploration, she peers at her skirt. Adjusts her hem.

  A farewell nod to Joe, he sees himself in the bar mirror. Alpha-male-style brown spikes, black in this light, smooth-faced, Joe-tall six feet. Black shirt, pants, and Prada slip-ons. Armani vest many-pocket-equipped with various stashes of the rave trade. Spikes firmly in place he flows toward his target, sidles canonical to her. She smiles, with a quiet-quick, “hey” before she evaluates the parquet floor.

  He acknowledges with practised poise. Ambers placed table-side, he asks her to dance. Q-Tipp torques the tunes (Billy knows the song order by rote) and bright strobes flash in one-sixty time. He catches her face flushed in a white Fresnel flash. Pretends not to notice. Persistence of vision falters in the strobing maelstrom, she flashes wraithlike in the throbbing, bobbing mob. He suddenly sweats. She coyly glances aside. Dizzy. Reinforcement necessary, he extracts a capsule from an upper pocket. Cap’s previous contents flushed, refilled with elixirs of his own. He opens cap, half-cap snort for each nostril. Just after the nose tingle, just before the brain melt, is that the bag lady lifting a plastic sack of trash? No, only an alpha who flings a raven in the ’40s jive style.

  He sees she sees his ecstasy in the flashes, her face implores wide. Deft fingers procure, proffer her a capsule. She two-beat hesitates then her limber fingers linger on his, she accepts. Flash. Cap in hand. Flash. Capsule apart. Flash nostril one, flash nostril two. Her head lolls, plain-Jane inhibitors down now and she’s girl enough. Tempo slows again, she flings, clings to him in a pseudo-foxtrot. He feels her ribcage in his splayed hands playing up and down her back, under her hair. No bra detected, he smiles knowing, yes, life is very good.

  Full floor circuit they’re back table-side he takes her hand and his ambers. She indicates no drink so they flow Joe’s way, slide to the far bar wall. Joe shows, she mouths something only Joe knows and Joe’s back in minutes with her tall glass. Her onyx-liquid smells of rye. He and she clink their drinks, she guzzles, breathless, and he matches her, elixirs gone one gulp. Wordless, they watch each other and she leans his way, touches his vest, indicates her nose. He procures and proffers again and her brown eyes loll after a simultaneous half-cap each nostril. Delight. She leans on the wall, elbow slumped on bar-top, legs stretched feline-style into his lap. He caresses her gam, slips off a flat slip-on and his hand ambles on. Her other now-shoeless foot is in lap, in his other hand. She leans back, his hands slide foot to shin to gam to ankle.

  He stops. Feels eruptions on her heel. Sees mouldybrown, hairy mounds in the shadowed Fresnel-red wash of her foot’s arch. He rubs his hand on his pants. Those hairy mounds slither and he blinks.

  This movement is a Joe-shadow delivering more ambers and onyx. They nod Joe’s way. She guzzles and she’s in ecstasy and digs in her skirt pocket for Ecstasy and she offers him his and they pop theirs. She decides it’s time, head-gesture bathroom way and he nods his assent. She rises, hesitates, sags into him, clings to him with head on his chest. Simultaneously shadows drift through Q-Tipp’s scarlet-come-blue flashing into stark-white-wash of the bathroom, saddlebag stretches in her black skirt which is really dark-brown, shiny, patched and many-washed. He scans her bruised legs, callused Achilles tendon, the scummy tiles and the florescent white-bright stabs his eyes to his brain stem. But he can’t turn back now as a boilermaker wave washes over him and she drags him into a stall.

  She says she’s clean and safe, safe she says please, please don’t worry about that, but he’s too practised and procures prevention from a vest pocket and they spiral in ecstasy’s cascading inevitability. Her blouse is open and he sees two c-section scars. Scalpel-cut pain slices scalp and he hastily strives, thrusts in time to the knives in his eyes and sighs because it’s finally over. She quivers and slumps and asks where he’s going while he cleans up with a towelette.

  He wants away from this tangled web, her eyes weep pustule-like, it seems. He’s shivery-cold and she’s on her raw-red knees, head pressed to his groin, pleads their baby would bind them soul-to-soul, is that not what he wants because what else is there? He heaves extraction on open stall door but she’s cloying, clinging, his legs bound not-quite-nightmare style. She bares her arms, red-angry parallel scabs from wrist to elbow-crook, she swears she’ll do it again. Legs free he leaps, she splays bare-chested on the grimy floor.

  He bolts past quizzical monkey stares of bathroom males, staggers into Q-Tipp’s cacophony of dark light. Head reels, stumbles past white-shirted simians writhing in strobing simulacrum of humanity. He divines under their white shirts red eruptions of steroid indulgences, the alphas’ arms extend to their knees, drag on the floor. They grope ringletted curls in their meaty paws, drag the bleach-blondes and raven-hairs to the bar’s cavernous corners where girls grovel near leering Neanderthals but don’t cower when clubs strike and penetra
te.

  While Q-Tipp’s skeletal effigy strobes, reels and aches and pounds in relentless time, he searches for gilded-elixirs and finds only apple cores and retreats from that digital oblivion. Falling through lightning haze he stumbles onto the bottom landing of the twelve steps and stars fill his head. He climbs, staggers through the back door, collapses on the black-globulated asphalt beside the disposal-bin, rolls onto his back. Staring skyward he sees stars faintly through the wash of Electronica’s neon sign.

  Head spins, he raises his knees, tries to push — somewhere.

  Then, hairy chin, tweed stretch-mark scars lean over him, inhibit his progress. He tries, “Help-me.” She straightens, looks around. Leans down again, his vest mauled. “Wait, don’t you remember me?” He gropes at stained, torn dark-brown stockings while wallet, vest pockets are emptied by grubby fingers with blackened, broken nails, and even the condoms are stashed in her shopping cart. She retreats into alley shadows.

  Inert, he feels Q-Tipp’s thumping deep-bass through his back. Electronica’s neon flickers, one hand grasps at a weed in a crack, the other splays on an asphalt globule, he feels its eruption under his palm. The breeze cools and he shivers on cold pavement. Faint stars leer down from the heavens.

  Blue

  HOW LONG CAN IT GO ON? Strains of “The Lord Is my God” float through my open bedroom window. I haven’t had a proper Sunday morning sleep since May when that church moved in across the alley. I liked it when it was an abandoned warehouse. At least the crack-addicts and prostitutes who hid behind the building had the decency to stay away until past two in the afternoon, around the time I usually get out of bed. They also had the courtesy to get lost by 3:00or 4:00 AM — my bedtime. Being able to sleep until mid-afternoon only six days a week is taking a toll on my sanity. If I close the window, the room becomes stuffy and smells of mould. I’m not sure what I’ll do when winter comes but I guess I’ll worry about that later.

  A warm, late September breeze billows my beige vinyl curtains, letting in sunlight. I have to close my eyes against the brightness. Why did the church people move in anyway? I’m in the church — screaming at them to shut up, smashing instruments. Kick over the drum set. The congregation scatters. My curtains drop back in place and the singing fades away, the tempo slowing, and “Amazing Grace” mellows in.

  The singing finally done, a distant clamour of voices follows, then the bass rumblings of the pastor’s voice, “Praise the Lord. Let me hear you.” The congregation echoes His praise. Maybe I’ll set fire to the place. Naw. Too much effort. I’m wide awake and really have to urinate. Bathroom bound across the matted, burnt-orange shag carpet, I brush one hand against the wall to prevent weaving too much and the bright spots pulsate on the periphery of my vision, whoa, and force me to sit down to empty my bladder.

  I flop back into bed while the praising continues. I’ll never get back to sleep. May as well get up. Let me close my eyes and rest just a couple minutes more — until the dizziness is completely gone.

  The smell of a barbecue wafts through the window. Is the sermon over already? My heart flutters. I’ve been losing time more and more. It’s not that I sleep. It’s more like an absolute absence of the notice of time passing. I won’t mention this symptom to the doctor. I’ll hold it in reserve in case my health insurance carrier comes up with a back-to-work plan. In the meantime, I’ll simply hope it doesn’t get worse.

  Are those children’s sing-songy voices right in my backyard? I stretch, swing my legs out of bed and stand up, wavering. I shut my eyes to part the curtains with both hands and slowly open my eyes to let them adjust to the sunlight. Two barbecues on the asphalt walkway right against the building billow smoke. It seems that this outdoor barbecue worship-fest is a monthly event. The former warehouse now church, a two-storey cindercrete building with barred windows on both the main and second floors, always reminds me of the storage bunkers at the mine.

  Children play soccer in the dirt lot. There’s milling and laughter. A large group of people with heads hung pray in a circle. The pastor’s voice booms but I can’t quite hear what he’s saying. He has an arm across another man’s shoulders.

  That pastor showed up at my front door in May with an invitation to the church’s grand opening — all neighbourhood residents welcome. I was just heading out for a supply of Orange Crush so couldn’t avoid talking to him.

  “Good afternoon,” he said, “I’m Pastor Roy from The Faith Nondenominational Church just behind your house here.” He extended his hand.

  I grabbed it and said, “I’m Matthew Brewster. Nice to meet you.”

  He pumped my hand twice, handed me one of his invitations, and said, “I’m just canvassing the neighbourhood here, spreading the word of the Lord and inviting you to join us in worship.”

  Stocky as a linebacker, with grey receding hair, he wore a white dress shirt that stretched over his barrel-shaped torso, and black, old-fashioned pleated cords. What kind of a pastor wears clothing like that?

  “Thank you but I really have to get going.”

  He said, “I do hope we’ll see you this coming Sunday.”

  “Sure thing,” I replied without turning around and fled down the sidewalk.

  And I’ve been wondering ever since about that oddball pastor and his new church behind my house, just outside my window. I could call the cops on them for disturbing the peace, my peace, but what good would that do? It would be as much use as calling in a complaint about the Friday and Saturday night stereo wars. I don’t talk to cops anyway — what am I thinking? They skulk around enough, in their black, Nazi-esque uniforms or ill-fitting, plainclothes polyester suits investigating fights, knifings, occasional shootings and when they’re not, they’re randomly carding and bullying the neighbours — not that I care about the neighbours — I just don’t want them doing that to me. My house is a 700 square foot, run-down rental with no basement, bare dirt and thistle and weeds front and back. The neighbours don’t care about my abode or me either.

  The prayer circle disperses — and there she is.

  She hovers alone on the periphery of the worshippers; not nearly as gaunt as she was when I first saw her.

  When I moved here in February, she and her co-workers hung around the street corner by the laundromat. I literally had to walk right through them, regardless of my determination to avoid the local denizens at all costs. I ran into her a couple of days after the church had its Sunday grand opening in May.

  I woke up early, a bit past noon, and couldn’t find any clean socks. The street was clear since the girls normally didn’t start their stroll until past two in the afternoon. I figured I could get to the laundromat and back before the day’s business started. I wouldn’t even have to walk by them if I timed it right. I whipped a pair of sandals on my bare feet and loaded my wicker laundry basket to overflowing with jeans, T-shirts, underwear, and the desperately needed socks. I beelined it for the laundromat. With head down, holding the basket with both hands against my left hip and only a slight spasm in my lower back and tingle in my spine, I looked up from my scan of the scaling cement sidewalk, cracks sporting a luxuriant growth of squat weeds, and she was standing directly in my path.

  We made eye contact. She had hazel eyes with mesmerizing green flecks, surrounded by purplish rings and crows-feet. Her cheeks were deeply pocked and sunken, suggesting a woman in her forties.

  One corner of her mouth turned up in a smile. “Hey.”

  I managed to mumble, “How you doing?”

  “Okay.” Her stringy brown hair hung to her shoulders. Densely packed freckles covered her nose and cheekbones. She wore a low-slung, blue denim mini-skirt, open jean jacket and cornflower-blue tube top. Even though she was skeletal, she had a slight roll of belly skin that hung over the front of her skirt. Stretch marks suggested a one time healthier, heavier body. Her hands were smooth and wrinkle free, and she had pert, bra-less breasts telling me she was only in her twenties.

  “You got the time?” she said. />
  “I don’t have a watch.”

  She made a soft nasal sound, shook her head, and said, “Oh-kaaay.”

  I manoeuvred around her, crossed the street, and dashed into the laundromat, up to a washer, flung my clothes inside and slammed the door shut. The palm of my hand stung when I pounded the coin in the slot. I tossed my basket on one of the scarred folding tables and stood a discreet distance from the window to watch her. She’d pace in one direction, turn, walk back round the corner, stop, glance around, and then return. She kicked at the weeds with her white sneakers. She crouched down to pluck a purple thistle flower. She smelled the flower and then tossed it. She watched crows taking flight into a partially overcast sky. Thumbs hooked into the belt-loops of her skirt, unsmiling, she looked bored, even when an occasional vehicle slowly drove past.

  I wondered if, for civility’s sake, I should make an effort to talk to her while my clothes washed. Maybe we could chat while she waited . . . wait, what the hell would I say? What the hell was I thinking, anyway?

  I settled back in a hard plastic chair and picked at my fingernails. I was about to go grab an Orange Crush from Joe’s, the small convenience store next door, but other girls were wandering to their posts. Why was everybody up so early? My wash finished and, after loading the dryer, I moved my chair to a cramped space between the end of the row of dryers and the laundromat’s bathroom wall. I leaned my head against the machine beside me and scratched at my fingernails some more and listened to the hum of my dryer. The distant vibration was soothing. My eyes went heavy and my head bobbed.

  The dryer was silent. A woman moaned in accompaniment to a rhythmic thumping. Both sounds increased in tempo; the noise came from the bathroom. Ah, hell. My clothes were already cool and I quickly tossed them into my basket without sorting or folding. I had no idea how much time I had lost. I dashed outside before the bathroom business was finished — I simply did not want to get involved. I was relieved to see the denim-clad girl was the only person on the street. I bolted across the intersection, cast a quick, sideways glance; she was watching me motor past. When I didn’t acknowledge her, she hung her head and turned away.