Kong moved his head to the right, just a touch. Two of the Maori boys stomped over to Kev, grabbed him on either side. A third came with something in his hand. Banjo caught a glint off it. Something shiny, sharp. The Maori stuck it into Kev’s neck.
Before Banjo could move, Kev shouted out a quickly muffled scream. The Maori moved away and threw the needle over the fence, holding it with his sleeve pulled over his hand so he wouldn’t touch it. Kev crumpled to the ground, eyes glazed, saliva sliding down his chin.
Banjo turned to Kong, jumped, flexed his whole body, and threw a fist at Kong’s face, connecting with a wet crunch. Kong’s head snapped back and his body lurched, staggering, but he held his ground.
Kong flew at Banjo and they fell, Kong on top, hammering away at Banjo underneath. A jab to the ribs, a full fist in the temple. Banjo shifted his weight and sent Kong over his head. They were standing again before the dust settled.
Banjo shook his head. “No, not doing this.” He had a huge melon of a bruise puffing his right eye up, leaking blood, but he didn’t move to wipe it away. He just shook his head again. “Not doing it, Kong.”
Kong’s face was twisted up in a way that made him look a demon from Maori mythology, the tribal tattoos running down the side of his neck seeming to glow with anger. He shook his head like a hellhound, shaking the anger off, relaxed a little, then stepped towards Banjo.
He came right up to Banjo’s face and said, “Got to be strong to survive.” With the last word, Kong moved his fist in a flash to Banjo’s gut. When he pulled away and let his fist open, there was a knife in his hand, blood on the point.
As Banjo crumpled to the ground, Kong stepped forward and threw the knife over the fence. “Being strong means being first.”
Banjo smiled, holding his side as blood oozed around his dirt-caked fingers.
Too right, Banjo thought.
Strong.
Strong enough to take that first step.
The first step up the stairway to heaven.
The Days When You Were Anything Else by Marcus Sakey
She calls sometimes. Late at night, drunk or worse. She calls to say she hates me.
One time she said a guy offered her money to blow him in a bar bathroom. Then, defiant, told me she’d done it. Fifty dollars, she said. That’s what she’s worth.
My Jessica. My baby girl.
The last call, three months ago, all she did was cry. Not heaves and jags. Gentle sobs like rain that falls all day. She never even said who it was. I held the phone and whispered, over and over, that it would be okay. That she should come home. That I loved her and would take of her.
When she finally spoke, just before she hung up, she said that it was all my fault.
She’s right.
After I got out of Dixon, I didn’t want to be part of the game anymore. It wasn’t a moral decision. I wasn’t trying to prove anything. It’s just that hustling is like Vegas. Play long enough, you always lose. And I’d lost enough.
So I talked to some people, and I landed a job working the stick at Liar’s, a dive under the Blue Line. I’d hung around there often enough anyway. It was the kind of bar where workingmen go to find someone to kick them ten percent for leaving the back door to a warehouse open. I’m not talking criminals. I’m talking honest guys with more bills and children than a nine-to-five coupled with a six-to-midnight could cover.
The criminals were the guys they talked to, guys like I used to be before I trusted the wrong person, before a job that should have set us up for six months instead sent me up for five years.
Tending is no way to get rich, especially at a dump like Liar’s, but my life is pretty simple. I have a studio in Little Puerto Rico and a phone number I make damn sure stays listed. At work, I keep a Louisville Slugger behind the bar, but rarely pull it out. I know these men, even the ones I’ve never met. After a year or two, I struck up a few friendships, guys that hang around after I flip off the neons. We talk and drink and smoke the place blue, and if Lester White is feeling magnanimous, do a couple of bumps. It isn’t quite a family, but it’s what I have, and it’s okay.
Sometimes, I even get to feeling good. Last week Lester was talking on his cell, chewing out the guy who runs a house he deals crank out of. He’s nice enough, Lester, until he isn’t. Then he’s, well, not nice at all. I’ve heard stories about him and pit bulls, and I don’t ever want to know if they’re true.
When Lester hung up, I asked if everything was okay.
“Fucking kids,” he said. “I don’t know how many times I’ve told him to get a fucking security cage put on the back door. Kid thinks because they’ve got one on the front, they’re safe, but these days…” He shook his head.
He didn’t finish, and I didn’t ask him to. I just topped off his Glenlivet. The rest of the guys I only spot Beam. Lester nodded at me, smiled, said, “Frank, when are you going to quit this bartending shit and come work for me? Kids these days, they aren’t worth a goddamn.”
Like I said, sometimes I get to feeling good. Silly, maybe, but there it is. I have a job and friends and a daughter who calls every couple of months, even if only to say she hates me. And as long as she keeps calling, there’s hope.
Hope is a dangerous thing.
He comes in around three, when the bar is all but empty. A thin kid in his twenties, sporting that cocaine skeeze: long, limp hair, a complicated goatee, a mean twitchiness to the eyes. A pack of Parliaments in his left pocket. A plastic-gripped pistol barely hidden by a half-buttoned work shirt. I know his type. I’ve been his type.
The locket dangles from his closed fist, rocking like a hypnotist’s crystal. “You know this, old man?”
Do I know it?
Till the day I die.
A lot of the stuff I gave Lucy over the years was pinched, and she was generally understanding. From the beginning, my wife knew how I made our money. But I spotted the locket in a display window one day I happened to be flush. When she saw that it came in a box, with a ribbon and everything, she hit me with that smile of hers, the one that lit me up inside. I know just what to put in it, she’d said. I’d asked, What? as I hung it on her. Us, she’d said, and shivered when I kissed the back of her neck.
That was a long time ago. I haven’t seen the locket since the last time she visited me at Dixon. “That’s my wife’s.”
“Not anymore.” His lips curl into a shape nothing like a smile. “You know who was wearing it last?”
And all of a sudden I know where this is going. “Yes.”
“Say it.”
I force the syllables. “Jessica.”
“Who?”
“My daughter.”
“So, then, Frank.” He curls his lips again. “I guess you better do exactly what I say. Right?”
I don’t have many pictures. Three, to be precise.
We used to have tons, albums full. I once joked Lucy that she must’ve been born with a Nikon attached to her head, all the pictures she took. And once Jessica came along, forget it. Our daughter was the most documented kid on the North Side.
But you can’t take that shit inside. They’ll let you, but you don’t want to. It kills you slowly to have proof of the way time passes, all those frozen instants that used to be yours. So you keep a couple of shots, two or three, and you stare at them until they don’t mean anything anymore, and at the same time, they mean everything.
After I got out, I tried to find out what happened to the rest of our pictures. But after Lucy died, shit fell apart. What little we had that was worth anything was sold for bills, and the rest probably ended up in a dump. I like to think that maybe a collector got the photos, one of those guys who sell random snaps in boxes down at the Maxwell Street Market. I check it some Sundays, flipping through other people’s lives, but I never find mine.