by Joe Meno
The grandfather approached unsteadily, not sure of what he was seeing, holding the gun before him at some distance, until he could be sure it was a man in front of him and not something he was imagining. He asked the very same question again—“Were you the one who shot me?”—and the creature, weepy-eyed, mouth flapping like a silvery amphibian, muttered, “Yes,” and then it was staggering forward, saying, “Kill me. Please. Kill me.”
The grandfather took a step back.
Then the animal lurched forward, a shard of broken mirror in its bare hand, eyes wild, still hissing, “Kill me. Kill me.”
The sound of the gun, over the rumble of the television set, was muffled. The old man winced as it echoed in his ears, the creature falling, hissing before him, holding the bloody spot above the right kneecap where he had been shot. The grandfather turned the point of the muzzle against the younger one and said, “I aim to get that horse back. If you want to end up like him, go on and tell me another lie.”
The kid, his face cramped, backed away, pushing himself up against the room’s green wallpaper. The other one was flopping around, howling, gritting his teeth, mumbling something like a prayer in a language the old man did not know or recognize. The kid was crying now, worse than his older brother, for all he wanted in the world at this moment was to tell the truth, but the words, the actual sounds, seemed so unfamiliar, so faraway. He was struggling with something more frightening than the terror of the moment; what he was wrestling with was the feeling that if he did not speak, he would become something as wretched, as weak, as miserable as his older brother. Finally, some seconds later, the words came, the name of the strip club, the trailer by the side of the building, the physical appearance of the deejay. The old man, after hearing what was said, took a step toward the door. Wary of the sound of panicked movement making it out into the hallway, he carefully slipped out, as the creature went on howling.
Quentin had disobeyed him again, and was standing at the top of the stairs, looking alarmed, his face whiter than it had ever been. Together they made their way down the stairs, the howl growing fainter with their descent, people emerging from rooms, staring from their windows, standing in the frames of their open doors.
* * *
By the time the deejay figured out who was standing before him, in the purple and yellow lights of the strip club, it was too late. This particular sort of myopia had been the cause of most of Davey-boy’s troubles. It was also the reason he believed he was the best strip-club deejay in the world: he could not be distracted, not by the half-naked girls nor flashing lights nor the songs themselves, though, as in this case, it also meant he was unable to reckon with any of life’s more complicated treacheries. As with Chandra, his ex. As with her multiple batshit, dangerous friends. He got punched in the belly before he knew what was happening. Then someone smashed a hard elbow against his face. He felt blood running from his left nostril, beading down the back of his throat. When he looked up, he was not surprised by what he saw. One of the attackers, a tall one with a reddish-looking beard, garbed in the manner of a gray-coated Confederate soldier, pulled him by the neck. The other, a wider, squatter one, also dressed in Civil War military costume, grabbed him under the arm, the two of them spiriting him down the dank hallway, past the girls’ dressing room, and out into the alley, where they visited several more blows upon his face.
“Davey, I thought you said we’d never have to see you again.”
“Jesus Christ, this is my place of business! How am I supposed to pay that crazy bitch back if you’re intruding upon my line of work?”
“You know how much you owe her. We know how much you owe her. Why don’t you just pay her back?”
“Jesus, don’t you think I would if I had it? I swear to God, by the end of the weekend—by the end of tonight even.”
“You got a deal cooking?” the tall one asked.
“By midnight, I promise. Please. Stop hitting me. I’m working things out. I promise.”
“What things?”
And then, by arrogance or stupidity, the deejay glanced over his shoulder to where the silver horse trailer happened to be parked.
The squat fellow smiled, stepped slowly across the parking lot, leaning up on his tiptoes, and stared into the oval-shaped window. “What do we have here?” he asked with a whistle.
Once again, Davey realized he had said what he had ought not to.
* * *
The girl was asleep, or again pretending to be. He switched off the truck, slipped his hat over his head, and ambled through the door of the men’s club. A burly giant of a boy, no older then nineteen or twenty, but nearly as big as an airplane factory, was working the front. Rick eyed him with a soft smile, not bothering to reach for his wallet. He strode past, blinking as a strobe light on the tiny stage caused a slender-limbed girl to vanish and reappear. He made his way over to the bar, ordered a cold one, and asked the acne-scarred woman working the counter where Davey was. She shook her head and pointed. Rick tipped the beer bottle back while he walked, drawing down a few sips as he approached the plexiglass deejay booth.
“You Davey?”
The deejay nodded, jamming another wad of tissues up his left nostril. He wiped a smear of blood from the tips of the fingers along the edge of his shirt and continued to ponder the poor decisions that had led to this recurring state of disabuse.
“I’m here about the horse!” Rick shouted into the deejay’s hairy left ear.
Davey nodded, held up one finger to motion that Rick was to wait a moment, then grabbed the microphone and said, “And now . . . the lovely Tanya.” The deejay crept around from the interior of the booth and offered his good hand—the right—to shake.
“What happened to you?” Rick asked with a laugh.
“I don’t know. I think I got too easy a disposition. But listen, I got some bad news for you.”
“What?”
The deejay raised both hands in absolution, no longer certain of anything, his right hand unharmed, the left covered in the plaster cast. He motioned to Rick and together they meandered down the leaky hallway, out the side door, and past the dumpster, the deejay pausing at the border of the parking lot, staring at the spot where the horse trailer had, only an hour or two before, been parked.
“Okay . . . Well, where the fuck is it?”
“I don’t know. These guys . . . these fucking asshole reenactors took it.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“They work with my wife at that casino. Ex-wife. I owe her a bunch of alimony and so she sent these fellas to come take it.”
“They took the horse?”
“Yes sir.”
“The horse I came here for? The horse we agreed to buy from you?”
“Yes sir, just the way I’m saying it.”
In the fading light, in these last few moments of day, Rick glared at the rube, glancing down briefly at his plastered arm. “You said you know where these fellas work?”
“Yes sir. The casino. Just outside of town. It’s the one looks like a plantation. It’s called Belle Plaine.”
“A casino.”
“You got it.”
Rick glanced down at the deejay’s cast again. “What happened to your arm there?”
“Same group of fellas. About two weeks ago. They’re messing with my livelihood. I ain’t ever gonna be able to pay that woman back.”
Rick snatched the pistol from the holster beneath his jacket and shoved the muzzle hard against Davey’s forehead, glaring at the awful asymmetry of his raw-looking face.
“On your knees.”
The deejay nodded, falling to his knees quickly, his hands outstretched before him. Rick loomed above him, his black mustache an unforgiving dark line.
“You got no business pretending to be something you’re not. You got no business trafficking with the likes of people like me. You lose that number, you get it? Anything having to do with me or the party that called you. That information has been
wiped clear from your memory, understand? That, or else I’ll come back through here and wipe it clear myself.”
“Yes sir.”
“How many of them came for the horse?”
“Two. And a third one driving.”
“If anybody asks, you tell them you did this to yourself.”
Rick peered down at the rube’s right hand—the good one—and raised his boot up high, the sound of gravel and bone being grinded together beneath the slate-colored heel.
_________________
Night falling upon a smudged face, red eyes ringed with mascara; upon a crowd of gawkers and perverts, diminished by years of lethargy; upon the entirety of an unsatisfied Southern town, masquerading as a city.
* * *
On and on, with little trouble, they found the strip club. It was past nine o’clock now. The summer light was gone. The grandfather sat in the passenger seat of the pickup for a moment, then turned to his grandson, studying the unevenness of the boy’s fearful face.
“If I told you to wait here, you wouldn’t, would you?”
The boy shook his head.
“All right then. We got nothing to be afraid of.”
Together they marched beneath the glowing sign, the lights flickering erratically above them, the boy’s face looking bright yellow, sickly, like a child with jaundice. A baby-faced giant working the door put out his large arm, barring Quentin from entering.
“You got ID?”
The boy shook his head. Jim doffed his hat and muttered, “He’s with me.”
“Well, sir, this here is a private establishment.”
“He’s my grandson.”
The giant smiled a little to himself, lowering his arm. The grandfather paid the cover charge and then he and his grandson ambled on, Jim placing the white hat back on the top of his head. Immediately, the noise of the night was swallowed up by the din and throb of the music inside.
The boy paused near the entrance, unsure where to set his eyes. A girl, a woman, was crawling around onstage like an epileptic. She wore high heels and enormous gold hoop earrings. There were, altogether, five dollars in singles stuck in front of her gold lamé panties. The boy watched her move, feeling an enormous ache well up in the center of his chest; it was the shame of knowing he was seeing something he would have never seen on his own, something he had done nothing to deserve. The girl was almost completely naked, bucking around like a deer, a jackal, an antelope, her skin the color of the flashing lights—pink, then purple, then pink again—her bare breasts smaller than he would have expected but somehow still mesmerizing in their movement, their shape, his eyes trailing down to the soft ridges of her navel, and in the flashing commotion he was surprised for a brief few seconds, in between the switching of the colored lights, by the field of whitish hairs just below the girl’s belly, like the flesh of a peach, having never before known or even considered such a thing existed, as the photos in the dirty magazines he had explored never detailed such a mystery.
For the grandfather, it was a little like death; not fulsome, not the least bit erotic, but scary, loud, lights buzzing this way and that, young girls—half the age of his daughter, almost the same age as the boy at his side—half-dressed, or less than that. Here was one walking around inviting patrons to the VIP room. Here was one performing a lap dance, her posterior posed directly in front of the customer’s face. It was not how he remembered it—the laughter, a radio playing the Armed Forces Network in the background, the hot whisper of a girl’s silky yellow blouse. His heart seized some and he staggered, holding his hand out against the side of a round table, the half-filled glasses rattling with his weight, then righted himself, stumbling forward, the lights and sounds whirling about his head, holding his hand out again but finding nothing to grab onto, the fingers grasping uselessly at the air, the bass-heavy thump of some song upsetting his sense of balance, the wound on his shoulder throbbing with pain. The old man’s hand reached out for something to grasp, and felt the insistence of the boy’s palm under his damp armpit, leading him over to an empty seat.
“You okay, Gramps?”
“You find the fella!” he shouted, teeth gumming at themselves, breath coming in fits and starts.
The boy lifted his eyes and began to make a tour of the long room. He discovered the deejay booth in the shadowy corner, before a girl—only a few years older than him—topless, breasts like seashells, white, pointed at their tips—leaned over and asked if he wanted a dance. The boy shook his head, glancing down at her breasts again, and, looking up into her heart-shaped face, he grinned, as if he had been made privy to one of the world’s most exceptional secrets. Walking on, he stood before the plexiglass booth, staring at the deejay’s odd shape, the mangled left arm wound up in a cast, the foam brace cushioning his short neck, a recent bruise blooming beneath his eye. His right hand was wrapped in a dirty bar towel full of ice. It looked like he was sobbing to himself. Quentin watched him, the guy lifting his right hand, inspecting the oddly bent thumb, unable to properly flex it. After a moment or two, the deejay looked up and asked, “What the fuck do you want?”
The boy turned back toward his grandfather. Slowly, like a weathered carnival tent being pulled to its full height, the old man crept to his feet, then made his way over, eyes locked on the deejay.
“What? What the fuck do you two want?”
Jim reached into the front of his jeans, thumbing the pistol that rested there. The deejay’s eyes followed, catching sight of the muzzle of the black weapon, the pupils then going narrow, the record escaping his grasp.
“We come for our horse,” the old man said.
“Fuck. You people . . . I mean, Jesus. What the fuck? Why can’t you people leave me alone?”
“Our horse. Where is she?”
Out the back once more, stepping down the dim tile hallway, past the brown dumpster to the empty blackness of the side parking lot, the old man stumbled, the crooked-necked deejay walking slowly ahead of him.
The horse was gone. There was no trailer, no rubber marks, nothing but the blank expanse of where it might have been parked. The grandfather squatted there a moment, touching his fingers to the dirty black pavement, fiddling with a stick, a soda pop cap, a brittle leaf, until he was sure there was nothing, no sign, no clue, no measure that still might help them. He stood up stiffly and turned back to the weepy-faced deejay.
“They took it,” the deejay said. “My ex-wife’s people. From the casino. It was a couple hours ago. Then someone else came for it. I think he was from somewhere out of state. Cowboy type. That’s all I know. I ain’t got the constitution to get bound up in this kind of shit. It’s not worth it to me. I can make twice as much moving coke.”
The old man felt his breath leave him for a moment, and then, when he could speak again, he asked: “You knowed it was stolen when you turned it over to them, didn’t you?”
The deejay, whose age was nearly impossible to judge, so absolute was his ugliness, looked away. He spoke again, not answering the question: “The other people . . . they were the ones who was supposed to buy it. I don’t know what happened to it. Those assholes come from the casino and . . . honest. I got to get back to work. I’m sorry for all the trouble I caused.”
The old man pulled the brim of his hat down over his eyes and marched slowly past, the boy following, the noise of the rumbling, heartless music, the glimmer of the dispiriting orange and yellow lights, once again playing upon their hearing and vision.
Then the pale-blue pickup throttled back down the highway toward the casino, its muffler sounding like it was about to fall off, the boy with his hands at ten and two on the wheel. It was nearing eleven o’clock at night or so the radio read, its rounded dials flaking gray. The grandfather sat in the passenger seat, drowsy, dozing, the signs and billboards flashing past becoming distant memories: his father and mother, him walking barefoot in the corn as a boy, his stretch in boot camp, his partner Stan Mutter dying, a girl in Korea named Lola Lola—her mother a
fan of the movies of Marlene Dietrich—who had a way of unbuttoning his clothes and hers with a kind of religious formality, the solemn bus ride home through Indiana, his father’s face again, Deedee in his arms, the chickens, the smell of their feathers in winter, his daughter—her laugh, her dimples, then her standing at the back door, the odd-colored boy beside her—the mare galloping along the fence line, these memories traced in the shapes and subtle outlines of roadside advertisements, one after another, a parade of all the things he had prized and then lost.
* * *
They got a red paper ticket from a valet for their truck but did not need to go very far before they saw two local police cars parked perpendicular to each other, an ambulance idling behind them, red lights flashing. They ambled toward it—the casino—an enormous white gabled building constructed to resemble an antebellum Civil War plantation. By now it had grown dark, and the red light from the ambulance made the whole world look like a dislocated nightmare. There, sitting on the curb, were two men, both dressed in Civil War regalia, one still wearing his gray cap, bruised about the eyes and mouth. A third one was lying on his back, a bullet hole in his thigh being tended to by an androgynous blonde paramedic.
Jim surveyed the wounded men, glancing up, scanning the crowd, the gawkers’ faces, the parking lot. He stepped along the circumference of where the onlookers were gathered, walking off a few yards toward a detective who was lifting a spent casing with a pair of silver tweezers. On a few more feet, there was a woman, her face a mask of both anguish and runny purplish mascara, an employee of the casino, or so her Civil War–era ball gown suggested, crying off a confession to a female police officer, who jotted it all down with pencil and pad of paper.
“He was from Texas. He had a black truck. I seen his license plates. I didn’t get the number but I saw the state. It was a man and a girl. The man, he was terrible.”
A few feet away, there was the strong odor of horseflesh, the reek of both animal urine and manure. Jim squatted the way he did to eyeball his chickens each day, taking in the familiar smell. Satisfied with what he had found, he stood, turned back to the boy, and said, “We need to go. Someone else has got her.”
