“I love you, Karen! I love you!” George yells. He yells it over and over, a gorgeous unending song of I love you’s as he cries in the snow, on his lumberjack ass, in a blizzard, professing his love for a woman who saved him. He cries, too, with relief that she didn’t see him kill the first killer, for that is a tall tale George will never tell, not to Karen, not to those muggers at Malforson’s. Nobody’s ever going to find either body; this roaring river swallows bodies into deep glacial canyons, pinning them under any of thousands of sunk logging trees, dozens of feet deep. That’s why the forest rangers won’t let anyone kayak it, no matter their skill. Everyone will hear about Reeker, for Karen and he will tandem tell that tale, but Reeker’s gone and no witness no longer to George’s crime. As for Kyle, everyone will think he slunk off in the night, disappeared himself into a new identity.
Ayup.
This Kyle tale stays with George, and probably with his ghost overseer, Martha, who protects him from their heavenly displacement, above these gorge streams, and in her afterlife dog, walks on mountain trails. She’s with Cope all right. She is Cope.
Yes, for sure, George doesn’t want any mugger to know about Kyle. So he better go find that damn robot head and get rid of it for good. And to punctuate that thought, to underscore that objective, a howl overtakes all noise. George turns to see Cope howling at the blurry moon, right there, within the trail Karen bombed down. When done, Cope bends her head and picks up a leather book in her teeth. She runs off to join her coyote pack.
ATM
Jon Land
“Don’t I know you?” the guy seated across from Venn on the A Train headed uptown toward 207th Street wondered.
Venn tried not to regard him, avoided meeting his eyes. Could be the guy had been a trick in weeks or months past. Somebody he’d picked up in a bar like Tubby’s Tavern where he was headed right now, after midnight like always. Venn didn’t remember faces like that and didn’t want to remember this one either.
“I don’t think so, man,” he said, not quite regarding the guy and not smiling.
Barely regarding him, in other words, which was normally all it took guys who’d paid him for sex at one time or another to move on in their minds. Sometimes they wouldn’t let it go, maybe even wanting more of the same which Venn sometimes provided. He figured he should have been grateful that he remained attractive at the ripe old age of twenty-two.
A glimpse caught in the subway car window across from his seat revealed the tousled hair that swam to his shoulders, mostly brown with some natural blondish streaks. His eyes were the same middle shade, more of a hazel, and a flash of his perfect smile could make any potential trick melt, even the straight ones or ones who at least thought they were straight. Of course, he was also blessed with a great ass which the reflection didn’t show, but that Venn regaled in catching guys, and girls, grab stealthy glimpses of that always lingered a bit too long.
Tubby’s Tavern wasn’t a college bar per se, but its location in a trendy uptown neighborhood was populated by a mix of young professionals, many associated in some respect with nearby Columbia University. A convenient place to gather or stop by alone for a drink.
“Are you sure?” the guy across from him started up again. “Because... ”
“You teach at Columbia?” Venn asked, still not fully meeting his gaze. “Maybe you’ve seen me on campus, something like that.”
“Oh, you’re a student.”
Venn nodded, calculating how many more minutes were left before the train’s final stop at 207th and Broadway came up. “Junior.”
“You look older.”
Ouch, Venn thought. Of course, he couldn’t say exactly what he’d looked like when he was younger, since foster homes, group homes, and shelters were not known for keeping photo albums. Venn had grown up in an assortment of those. His was a classic American tragedy, like homeless veterans and that sort of shit. He chose not to dwell on his past — or his future, for that matter. “Live in the moment” was Venn’s mantra, out of necessity as much as choice.
There wasn’t much glamorous about being a hustler, but Venn had been the subject of a profile in New York Magazine and was included, anonymously as well, in the New York Times Magazine too. One trick he’d done claimed to be a film producer who wanted to base a movie around him. Venn had pretended to be excited and given the guy a disconnected number, because Venn thought he was full of shit. Months later, the same New York Magazine issue containing the article on him included the guy’s picture in a story on Hollywood up-and-comers, meaning he’d been legit.
If that didn’t beat all.
The train slid into the station and ground to a squealing stop, Venn and the guy across from him rising at the same time.
“You have yourself a nice night,” the guy said, a forced smile accompanying his words.
“You, too. Be safe.”
The man’s face played with a smile, like he knew something he didn’t want to share. “I was just going to say the same thing to you.”
Now Venn was regarding him closer, the man’s features appearing formless, not quite the same as they’d appeared before, but not really different either.
“I hope you find what you’re looking for,” the guy said, flashing a smile that lingered briefly. “I think this might be the night.”
“For what?”
Before he could answer, the doors whooshed open and a swarm of riders swallowed the man up. Venn stepped onto the platform after him, looked one way and then the other, but the man was gone.
Venn needed cash. Money made for the best disguise. Guys in a bar seeing you paying for your own drinks took the hustler thing off the table until he put it back on. Same thing for clothes and in Venn’s case, that meant dressing like a college student. Khakis or jeans to go with the right button-down and jacket courtesy of North Face or something like that.
The problem tonight was that his bank account was closing in on zero, all of fifty bucks left to his name which in his case was “Venn” and nothing more. Using his last name meant acknowledging his past, something Venn avoided at all costs given there was nothing there worth remembering. So why not avoid his surname as much as possible? He never used it when introducing himself, and the people he normally introduced himself to didn’t much care.
Still, fifty bucks was fifty bucks and Venn set out in search of an ATM machine to take forty of it out, leaving him ten unless tonight proved to be a profitable one assuming he could find the right trick. Venn could have ventured a bit further uptown to where deeper congestions of bars were clustered. He could have hit the bars frequented more by Columbia students. But he only did that when he needed a place to crash for the night, maybe poach some food for breakfast the next morning, seeing those students as different kinds of marks since any college student worth seducing wouldn’t need to pay for what Venn was offering.
ATMs were normally everywhere these days but not so, apparently, here in the area of Broadway and 207th Street. He found two banks but slipping his card into the exterior slot failed in both cases to make the glass door snap open. Since Venn carried the card loose in his pocket, maybe the magnetic strip was fucked up or something.
He walked about in search of an ATM held inside a bodega or all-night coffee shop or convenience store, starting to get anxious when he spotted one on a darkened stretch of Sherman Avenue just off 207th Street squeezed between a shoe repair shop and a cut-rate men’s clothing store, both with steel grates bolted down over their facades. The ATM was unique because it was squeezed inside an old-fashioned phone booth of all things which had faded from use around the time Venn was born. The glass was cracked in spider web fashion by what looked like well-placed rocks, reducing previously scrawled graffiti to fractured letters.