by Joe Hill
Aisha cast a glance at the strip mall. They were parallel with the coin-op, the brightest storefront in the whole row. The door was propped open with a cinder block, and they were close enough that she could hear the sound of tumbling dryers. She was sure at any moment someone would appear in the doorway and yell.
She crept toward him. She wanted to grab his hand and pull him along, but when she got close enough to take his sleeve, he yanked his arm free and kept writing.
As he scribbled away, he began to read. “‘Dear Sir. It has come to our attention that you neglected to lock the doors of your mint-condition Alfa Romeo this evening. We have taken the liberty of locking the doors for you. Please be aware that this neighborhood is full of smelly, ungroomed hoboes who might have used your vehicle for a toilet. If you are not currently sitting in a puddle of stanky wino piss, you can thank the Promoters Of Normal Urination team. Support your local P-ON-U squad today!’”
In spite of herself, Aisha laughed. Colson drifted from one moment that belonged in a play to another, with a serene, spacey calm that approached indifference.
He folded the letter and placed it on the dash. When he drew his arm back, the sleeve of his denim jacket caught a CD and knocked it to the floor. He picked it up, considered it, then set it on the roof of the car. He grabbed up his note and began to write again.
“‘Pee Ess,’” he said. “‘We have taken the further step of absconding with your copy of Pocket Full of Kryptonite to protect you from the Spin Doctors—’”
“Colson!” Aisha cried out, heartsick to go.
“‘—who can be harmful to your hearing. Please replace with Public Enemy and treat yourself with daily doses until you are less of a lame-ass.’”
“Colson!” she shouted again, almost screamed. It wasn’t funny anymore. It had never been really funny, even if he’d tricked a giggle out of her.
He slammed the door and wandered on, her backpack hitched over his shoulder. He had a finger through the hole in the center of the CD. Rainbows shimmied across the surface. He went three yards, then paused to look back with a certain impatience.
“We going or not? Don’t yell at me to hurry up, then stand there like you can’t remember how to move your feet.”
When she began to run after him, he turned and walked on.
Aisha chased him down, grabbed his wrist, set her heels, and pulled.
“Put it back.”
He stopped, looked at the CD on his finger, then over at Aisha’s hands on his right wrist. “Naw.”
He walked on, mostly dragging her.
“Put it back!”
“Can’t. This is my good deed for the day. I just rescued someone’s ears.”
“Put! It! Back!”
“Can’t. I locked the door so no one steals something actually worth stealing, like the gold St. Christopher medal hanging from the rearview mirror. Come on, now. Quit it. You’re ruining my buzz.”
She knew why he took it: not because he was a thief but because it was funny, or would be funny when he told his friends. When he told them about P-ON-U, the CD was his proof it wasn’t just a story. Colson needed stories to tell like a gun needed bullets, and for the same reason—to slay.
But Aisha also knew about fingerprints and felt it was only a matter of time before the police dropped in to arrest him for grand theft Spin Doctors. And he wouldn’t get to go to London and be Hamlet, and his life would be ruined, and hers, too.
He grasped her hand, and on they went, around the corner, along a buckled side road in even worse condition than the main parking lot. He led her to the back corner of the lot and into the weeds, to a sagging chain-link fence, half smothered by the high grass and undergrowth. By then she was weeping steadily and silently, drawing deep, shaking breaths.
Colson bent to help her up onto the fence—and seemed genuinely shocked to see the tears dripping off her chin.
“Hey! What’s going on, Twinkletoes?”
“You! Should put! It! BACK!” she shouted in his face, hardly aware of how loud she was being.
He bent backward, like a bush in a gale, and opened his eyes wide. “Whoa! Whoa, Godzilla! I can’t! Told you. I locked the dude’s car.”
She opened her mouth to shout something else and sobbed instead. He caught her shoulder and held her while she shook and made big, racking sounds of misery. He used his tee to wipe her face. When her vision came unblurred, she could see him smiling with a kind of bewilderment. All you had to do was see him smile to understand why Juliet would die for him.
“No one cares about a Spin Doctors CD,” he said, but she already knew she had won and was able to catch her breath, hold her next sob in. “Damn, girl. You’re going to ruin a perfectly good joke, you know that? You’re like the joke police. Going to write me a ticket for being flagrantly amusing? How about I go back and put the CD on the roof of the car? Will that make it better?”
She nodded, didn’t trust her voice. She told him she was glad by hugging him instead, throwing her wiry nine-year-old arms around his neck. For years afterward she could close her eyes and bring it back, exactly what that hug had felt like, the way he laughed, one hand between her shoulder blades. The way he hugged her good-bye.
He rose, turned her toward the fence. Her fingers found the chain-links. He scooped one hand under her butt to help her over the top, and she dropped down onto the other side, into the thick brush.
“Wait for me,” he said, and slapped the fence.
He went, still unconsciously carrying her Little Mermaid backpack over one shoulder, the CD hanging off the index finger of his right hand. The disc flashed silver in the darkness, as bright as Romeo’s bodkin. In a moment he had disappeared around the corner.
Aisha waited in the velvety darkness, a night orchestra of insects playing their sleepy lullaby in the undergrowth.
When Colson came back, it was at a trot that accelerated to a sprint when someone yelled. He’d been gone only a few seconds, half a minute at most. He darted along the shattered side road, head down, backpack slapping against his shoulder.
A man came running after him, a man in a heavy belt with things rattling and jangling on it. The night lit up in a flurry of silver and blue lights, flashing like a simulated thunderstorm in a theater. The man in the belt was slow, panting for breath.
“Put it the fuck down!” screamed the man in the jangling belt—a police officer, a white kid, Aisha saw now, not much older than Colson himself. “Drop it! Drop it!”
Colson hit the fence with a steely crash, hit it so hard that Aisha unconsciously staggered even farther back into the gloom of the thicket. Colson went halfway up and then snagged in place.
The Little Mermaid backpack—later Officer Reb Mooney would state that he had believed it was the Hermès purse stolen from the scene of the stabbing earlier that evening—had dropped off Colson’s shoulder as he ran, and by the time he slammed into the fence, he was holding it by just one strap. A bent hook of old steel at the bottom of the fence snared the fabric, and as Colson climbed, the backpack was yanked out of his hand.
Colson glared down at it and grimaced, considered it for an instant, then dropped back down. He sank to one knee to collect Aisha’s backpack out of the dirt.
The police officer came to a stumbling stop eight feet away. That was the first Aisha saw the gun in his right hand. Mooney, a big freckled boy who planned to marry his high-school sweetheart in just two weeks, gasped for breath, red in the face. A cruiser rolled into view, coming around the corner of the Mercantile, lights flashing.
“Down on the ground!” Mooney screamed, coming closer, lifting the gun. “Hands in the air!”
Colson looked up and began to raise his hands. He still had the CD ridiculously stuck to the end of one finger. The kid cop put his boot on Colson’s shoulder and shoved. Colson hit the fence, grunted, and rebounded. He bounced off the fence so hard he almost seemed to lunge at the officer. The CD flashed in his hand.
The gun went off. The first b
ullet pounded Colson Withers into the fence once more. Mooney fired six times in all. The last three rounds went into Colson’s back, after he had sprawled onto his face. Later both Mooney and his partner, Paul Haddenfield, told the grand jury they’d believed the CD was a knife.
In the aftermath, the night ringing with the echoes of those shots, neither officer heard Aisha Lanternglass fleeing into the Tangles.
The following summer the St. Possenti Players would dedicate that year’s performance of Shakespeare in the Park to Colson’s memory. It was Hamlet.
A white guy starred.
September 2012–December 2012
BECKI AND ROG ALWAYS MET at the gun range. First they’d unload a few hundred rounds, then he’d unload into her in his cherry Lambo.
The very first time they went shooting together, they took turns with his Glock, emptying the thirty-three-round magazine into a human silhouette.
“Goddamn,” Becki said. “Is a clip that big even legal in this state?”
“Honey,” Rog told her, “this is Florida. I don’t know if you’re legal, but the mag is fine.” Like she was still in high school and not taking college courses in business management.
He stood behind her, his crotch pressing against her backside and his arms reaching around her. He smelled good, like lemons and sandalwood and the sea, and when he held her, she thought of yachts and gem-bright waters. She wanted to dive for treasure with him and soap the Atlantic off him afterward in a hot shower.
“One hand cups the other,” he told her. “Press your thumbs together. Keep your feet apart. Just like that. No, not that wide.”
“I’m already wet,” she whispered to him.
She pumped thirty-three bullets into the target, pretending it was his wife’s big fake tits. Afterward her whole body hummed in a nice postorgasmic kind of way. It was always foreplay for them.
She had met Roger Lewis for the first time when she was sixteen. Her father had brought her to the mall, to Devotion Diamonds, so she could pick out a gold padlock on a gold chain, a gift for her to wear to her chastity pledge at church that Sunday. Rog helped her try a couple things on, and she turned this way and that in front of a little mirror on the glass counter, admiring the sparkle around her neck.
“You look good,” Rog said. “Unblemished.”
“Unblemished,” she repeated. It was a curiously entrancing word.
“We’re hiring salesgirls this summer. If you sold a friend a padlock like the one you’re wearing now, you’d get ten percent of the price, on top of your paycheck.”
Becki looked at the price tag on the gold chain and let the heavy weight of the lock fall back against her breastbone. Ten percent of what she was wearing was more than she made in a whole week of packing bags at Walmart.
She wore her padlock out of the store and had an application folded into her clutch. That Sunday she swore to her parents, her grandparents, her little sisters, and her entire church that there wasn’t going to be any man in her life until marriage, except her father and Jesus.
Becki was still wearing her padlock the first time Rog rubbed her off through her panties, in the office in the back of the shop. By then she was out of high school and making almost five hundred dollars a month in commissions alone.
The first few times they went to the range together, they stuck with the Glock. She pulled her hair back in a do-rag to keep it out of her face and to feel more street. Rog was okay with that, but the first time she tried to shoot like a gangster—the gun turned sideways, arm stretched out and wrist bent downward slightly, like she’d seen the bangers do in movies—he let her squeeze off only a single round before he reached in and took her forearm. He forced her to point the barrel at the floor.
“What’s that shit? You’ve emptied a few mags at the range, so now you think you’re Ice Cube? You couldn’t be more white if you were shoved down and drowned in a vat of cream cheese. Don’t do that again. I don’t want anyone here seeing you shoot that way—it’ll make me look bad.”
So she shot the way he told her, feet slightly apart, one a bit forward, the other a bit back, arms outstretched but not fully extended. Becki aimed for the center mass, because Rog told her if you hit the chest, you were going to get something juicy. Pretty soon she was bunching her shots together from thirty feet, grouping them in the area of the heart.
After that he switched things up, met her at the range with his SCAR 7.62mm, loaded with 149-grain full-metal-jacket rounds. She pumped them out in bursts, bap-bap-bap, bap-bap-bap. Becki liked the smell of the propellant even better than Rog’s cologne, liked to smell gun smoke in his clothes, in his thinning blond hair.
“It looks like a machine gun,” she said.
“It is,” he said, and took it out of her hands and swiveled a selector switch. He fitted the extended stock into his left shoulder and narrowed his eyes and pulled the trigger, and it went off in a furious, thudding clatter that made Becki think of someone hammering fiercely at an old manual typewriter. He cut the silhouette in half. She was so eager to shoot it herself that she almost snatched it out of his hands. Becki didn’t know why anyone had to have cocaine when you could just get a gun.
“Don’t you need a special license to blaze away with an automatic weapon?” she asked him.
“All you need is ammunition and a reason,” he said. “You might want a license, I don’t know. I’ve never looked into it.”
He was vain about his hair, was always patting it to make sure the thin yellow swirl covered his bald spot. He had deep creases at the corners of his eyes, but his body was as pink and clean as a boy’s, fine golden hairs spun on his chest. She liked to play with that fine down, was pleased by the silky feel of it. Silk and gold always came to mind when he was stretched out naked beside her. Silk and gold and lead.
Ten days before Christmas, she climbed into the Lambo after work, believing he was going to drive her to the range. Instead he drove her to the Coconut Milk Bar and Inn, twenty miles south of St. Possenti. They had a suite on the first floor under the names Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, which she sensed was one of Rog’s jokes. She was well practiced at smiling blandly and indulgently to keep him from realizing she didn’t get the reference. His conversation was sprinkled with lines from movies and music she knew nothing about: Dirty Harry and Nirvana and MTV’s The Real World—old stuff like that, not even worth googling.
He carried a black Teflon bag with him, the handles padlocked together. She’d seen him move jewelry in that kind of bag but didn’t ask questions.
The old woman behind the counter looked from Becki to Rog and back and made a face like she had a bad taste in her mouth. Becki met her bitchy stare with calm indifference.
“Isn’t it a school night?” the clerk asked when she pushed their key across the counter.
Becki took Rog’s arm. “I think it’s so great that places like this hire old folks to give them something to do besides play bingo in a senior center somewhere.”
Rog laughed his hoarse smoker’s laugh and swatted Becki on the rear. To the old woman with the tinted orange hair, he said, “You’re lucky she didn’t bite. She ain’t had her shots. You don’t know what you might catch.”
Becki chomped her teeth together at the offended old bitch behind the register. Rog took her by the elbow and steered her down a corridor with thick white carpet that looked like it had never been walked on. He led her past brick arches that opened onto an outdoor patio, built around three swimming pools, each on a different terrace, waterfalls splashing between them. Couples sat on wicker chairs flanked by tall patio heaters, columns of caged fire. The palm trees had been done up for the holiday, the fronds hung with emerald Christmas lights, so they looked like fireworks frozen forever in spectacular mid-explosion. Becki shut her eyes to better hear the sound of ice clinking in glasses. You didn’t need to drink to get drunk. That sound alone made her feel intoxicated. She didn’t look around until he stopped at the door to their suite.
The sheets
were slippery silk, or something like silk, the color of vanilla frosting. The bathtub in the enormous bathroom had been hewn out of a hunk of lava rock. He put the chain on the door while she sat on the edge of the king mattress.
He carried his bag to the bed. “This is just for tonight. Everything goes back tomorrow morning.”
He popped the lock, unclasped the wire jaws of the bag, and poured out a heap of treasure. Gold hoops and freshwater pearls on silver ropes, bracelets crusted with diamonds, and necklaces hung with brilliant stones. It was as if he had dumped a bag full of light onto the opalescent sheets. There was white powder, too, in a crystal bottle like one you might fill with perfume. It might almost have been crushed diamonds. Rog had taught her to like a little coke before sex. It made her feel good and dirty, made her feel like a degenerate aiming to do something criminal.
She was almost breathless at the sight of all those gems, all those shining threads.
“How much . . . ?” she asked.
“About half a million dollars. Go on. Wear it. Put on all of it. I want to see you chained in it. Like a sultan’s concubine. Like I bought you with all this.” Rog used words better than anyone Becki knew. Sometimes he sounded like a lover in an old movie, tossing off poetic dialogue in a clipped, indifferent way, as if it were the most ordinary thing to talk like that.
Amid the pile of treasure was a bra-and-panty set, gold straps speckled with rhinestones. There was also a long box wrapped in metallic gold paper, bound in a silver ribbon.
“The loot has to go back to the shop tomorrow morning,” he said, and pushed the gift box toward her. “But this is yours to keep.”
She grasped the wide, slippery package. Becki loved presents. She wished Christmas came every month. “What’s this?”
“A girl doesn’t wear that much bling,” Rog told her, “unless she knows she can keep it.”
She tore away the paper and ribbon and tugged open the box. It was a .357 Smith & Wesson with a satin-white grip that looked like pearl, the stainless-steel finish of the barrel engraved with fleurs-de-lis and curlicues of ivy.
