Jimmy’s face could have been cut from a rotting saddle. His lips were pulled back from his teeth for a hardened, loveless smile and his eyes were windows to nothing but the hollow of his head. I don’t have a single good reason for having exhumed him from his catbox coffin, though I have many bad ones. A steady diet of boredom and paranoia, spiked with bourbon and painkillers consumed in isolation, has impaired my judgment to such a degree that propping Jimmy in a chair seemed funny during the moment. I’d been wagering against an imaginary and anonymous house and now the house had a name.
I shuffled and cut. Watch and learn, Jimmy Rehab, or at least watch. You can do that much. I burned the top card and dealt the next two and turned them over for the high card. I came up with the two of hearts while Jimmy showed a queen.
“Your deal, Jimmy.”
I want to believe I’m still here because of my word. The truth is, between the law and the Numbers, I’d survive an hour above ground on a good day. I’m safe, and staying here is the only way I’ll ever be certain that Skinner Jones didn’t hand over a map to Plan Q before they snuffed him, which means Skinner Jones never said Johnny Pharaoh so he could walk away from the jewelry store.
Jimmy’s expression never changes. He pulls his hands close with his fingers curled inward, clinging to a phantom noose. His fingernails keep growing and I play his hands for him.
I chase my bad run with a big bet, ten thousand milligrams to break even. Jimmy deals me a hard twenty, two kings against his six up. My luck’s turning but Jimmy doesn’t flinch. I split the kings for a hard twenty and a hard seventeen before I stand.
Jimmy draws a five. Jimmy draws an ace. House rules call it a soft twelve so he hits. The king breaks his winning streak and I drag twenty thousand milligrams into my bottle. My luck is changing but Jimmy Rehab doesn’t say a word, doesn’t blink. It’s unnerving, I tell you. He stares right through me like he’s been doing for weeks.
The woman who laughed
by William T. Vollmann[14]
Tenderloin
The Zombie had a room in a residential hotel in the Tenderloin, next to a “health club,” and on Sundays he sat in Boedekker Park and listened to the whores say, “Wherever you be going, I be going,” and he watched the dark gray pigeons fixed like statues on the roof-ledge of the building adjoining Big Red’s Bar-B-Que, while old women sat across from him, combing their hair for hours. Here he whiled away the day, tasting blood as he licked his decaying gums. (The Other did the same.)—“If you ain’t got nothin’ else, then ’bye,” he heard a whore say. Pigeons gurgled and chuckled and waddled fatly. A man in a black hat leaned against the lamppost smoking, and the smoke was thick like milk. A woman in a tan coat sat bent over her knees, scuffing her tennis shoes to keep the flies away, and then suddenly raising her graying head, more or less as a jack-in-the-box will pop abruptly out of its gay metal coffin. The Zombie saw that she was weeping. Beside her sat The Woman Who Laughed.
He had found the rooming house when he cane-tapped down Turk Street past The Woman Who Laughed, and a lady on crutches was purring, “I smell fire,” at which The Zombie swiveled his head up on his long stem of neck to see smoke coming out of one of the barred windows of a black brick building that looked old and dirty and hopeless, and there was a sign saying ROOMS AVAILABLE — LOW MONTHLY RATES, and The Woman Who Laughed came rushing up and sniffed the smoke like an animal, snorting and laughing. The hallway smelled like dead fish and never stopped humming with slow fat flies. There was a security camera in the elevator, under which some knowing soul had scrawled RAPE ITCHES ANYHOW. The Zombie lived on the eighth floor, a special place for special people, where the hall lights were burned out and the carpet was charred. The door to his room bore hatchet marks. Inside was a dirty sink which he used as a urinal, a three-legged bed with a greasy mattress, and a window that looked out upon a brick wall. It was very dark and still in that room. The Zombie hid in his bed and looked at the brick wall through the window. Perhaps it was this lack of a view which had impelled him to go wandering in the Blue Yonder. (Oh! Had he lived in a mansion on Russian Hill, then he never would have become The Zombie; is that what I am saying? — Not at all; I do not want to investigate causes and hypothetical has-beens; The Zombie was a thing without a cause.) — He did not go out much when he was The Other, either; — for more or less the same reasons that blood in a dead body soon becomes permanently incoagulable, The Other had never been a good mixer. Sometimes The Zombie woke up with a fever headache, the chills racing up and down his fingers like the arpeggios of a concert pianist, and there was a meaningless throbbing in the soft tissues of his buttocks. He lay rubbing his neck and staring up at a brown stain on the ceiling. An ammoniac smell sometimes came to his nostrils then, caustic and clean, as if he had gotten chlorinated water in his nose or sustained a sharp blow to the face. This meant that The Woman Who Laughed was sitting outside on the front steps with her dress hiked up, tapping her toes on the concrete and laughing.
She had a very round pimpled face. She might have been Indian, for her nose was flattish and she had black bangs and high cheekbones. She stank. He did not know where the clean smell came from. Her black eyes were tolerantly knowing, mocking you without malice, as if she had seen every sort of death and found it funny, but if you tried to look into her eyes she would cover herself with her arm and shake with laughter. If you tried to talk to her, she ran away. (She dreaded the warning-pangs of encounters which might poison her laughter, as Carolina had dreaded the defilement of her drinking cup, for we all want to keep something clean, no matter if it is a lump of ice dwindling in our hotly protective hands.) Once a tweed-suited radical woman came marching and smiling down Turk Street, distributing leaflets, and The Woman Who Laughed accepted one politely and read it and started to laugh so hard that her fat legs quivered, and The Zombie heard her laughter up on the eighth floor, so he went downstairs and stared at her through the bars of his golden eyelashes and held a quarter in front of her to draw her inside, and she kept laughing and reaching for the quarter as she followed him step by step, dragging her two black garbage bags behind her through the hallway, and he pulled her and her bags into the elevator in a familiar way, with his hand on her shoulder, and she laughingly suffered his touch because she knew him, so he suffered himself to breathe her stench all the way to the eighth floor, while the security camera emitted its death-rattle and a drop of dirty water slunk down the elevator wall, until finally the doors opened and he showed her the quarter again to impel her down the hall, so that then he could unlock his door, sweeping moldy underwear off his one chair and sitting her down on it as he lay back on his bed like a crocodile floating on the surface of some dirty brown river. There he watched her nod her head and spread her hands and wave at the air, and then as her shoulders would sag she’d shake her head and begin to laugh helplessly. She knew him! Her feculence aroused his disgust and anger to a degree bordering on sexual pleasure. (How could she smell so bad?) Sitting in his chair, stroking her trash bags tenderly, she unwrapped a lifesaver and ate it. She looked at the wrapping and laughed and laughed. When she laughed on Turk Street or in the brickwork park, passersby smiled slyly behind their hands, thus proving that humor is indeed contagious, especially when joy-wrapped in idiocy and stench; so she contributed some cheer to the world, although of course it was not the reward of the world’s scornful merriment which elicited her good deeds; it could not be, because she kept laughing in The Zombie’s room even though The Zombie did not laugh or smile or do much of anything. (All he wanted was to know why she smelled so bad, and where the other clean smell came from.) What made her so happy? (She smelled like rotten wharves, like tuna-canning factories, like a mass grave on a hot afternoon.) Sometimes the sweet smell of lifesavers on her breath would overpower her odor temporarily, like a soothing cherry coughdrop to put a dead woman to bed. Her hair was washed and done up in a neat mare’stail; who could have helped her? — She laughed and pointed at the window. For the first time, The Zombie saw something there other than the brick wall next door: — Pigeons were tapping at the window with their wings; they wanted to get in. The Zombie got up and ran his fingers through his hair and opened the squeaking groaning window (he had never done that before), and The Woman Who Laughed peeked over her shoulder to make sure that no one would rob her or hurt her and then took a slice of blue-moldy bread from one of her trash bags and threw it on the floor, and the pigeons rushed down into the room jostling each other in a cloud of feathery dust, dirty-black pigeons and dirty-gray pigeons, and they crowded on the floor around the bread waddling fatly with downcast heads and pecked until all the bread was gone; then they pecked at each other, and the Woman sat there with her black trash bags clutched to her, working her mouth as the pigeons ate, and the smell from her got worse and worse. It was a sweetish rotten smell. Laughing, she opened the other bag to show him. Inside were dead pigeons, so decomposed now as to be squashed fans of feathers stuck together by slime, and flies buzzed out of the bag and landed on The Zombie’s underwear and some of them whined and went greedily back inside that dark stinking bag and settled between the feathers and on the sharp black pigeon-heads and walked into the black pits where the pigeons’ eyes used to be. Looking at this made the Woman very happy. Oh, how she laughed! (Was she a murderess or just a collector?) The tears rolled down her cheeks. She laughed and laughed and shook her head in smiling humorous disbelief at the ways of the world. Then she sat still for a while, resting her pimpled cheek in her hands. Heat and dust streamed in through The Zombie’s window.