“It’s okay,” the girl says. “It’s okay.”
Her pimp bangs on the side of the van and opens the door.
Time’s up.
I’ve seen enough that I could write my own Bible. For example, here’s the parable of the brother who hung on and the one who felclass="underline" Two months later I’m walking home from my new job guarding a Mexican dollar store on Los Angeles. A bum steps out in front of me, shoves his dirty hand in my face, and asks for a buck. I don’t like when they’re pushy, and I’m about to tell him to step off, but then I realize it’s Leon.
He’s still wearing his suit, only now it’s filthy rags. His eyes are dull and overcast, his lips burnt black from the pipe. All his charm is gone, all his kiss-my-ass cockiness. Nobody is following this boy anymore but the Reaper.
“Leon?” I say. I’m not scared of him. One punch now would turn him back to dust.
“Who you?” he asks warily.
“You don’t remember?”
He opens his eyes wide, then squints. A quiet laugh rattles his bones.
“Old McGruff,” he says. “Gimme a dollar, crime dog.”
I give him two.
“Be good to yourself,” I say as I walk away.
“You’re a lucky man,” he calls after me.
No, I’m not, but I am careful. Got a couple bricks stacked, a couple bucks put away, and one eye watching for the next wave. Forever and ever, amen.
Theresa E. Lehr
Staircase to the Moon
From Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine
I wore leathers to her funeral, along with the pearls. The newspaper said the necklace was worth $70,000 Australian. That’s big bikkies in Broome. A small fortune. At least to me. I thought my sister had hocked the necklace. She’d sold her BMW and lost her apartment overlooking Sydney Harbour last year. Just goes to prove what I always told her: you can’t be addicted to heaven dust and the material world at the same time.
Our mum had eyed that string of South Sea pearls longer than I care to remember, so I was caught off guard when my twin sister left them to me. I figured her motive was to twist the knife in Mum one last time. It had nothing to do with me. Making amends was not Shinju’s style.
The day after the funeral, photos of me wearing her famous pearls and straddling my Ducati at the front of the motorcade plastered the Herald and later the Australian gossip magazines. I didn’t wear my helmet and Mum said I had an ax to grind. I denied it, but we both knew I’d never forgiven Shinju for the ink-vine scar that runs down the right side of my face. Did I want everyone to know that? Maybe so.
But murder has a way of either bringing families together or driving them apart. In our case, Shinju’s homicide squashed us into a world we’d never shared. Mum, Pop, and I leaned on each other, licked one another’s wounds. Unfamiliar, sticky emotions drove us to hound the Broome police until they stopped returning our calls and refused to see us at the station.
You may wonder why a screwed-up family with very little tenderness for one another would join together. Was it out of love for Shinju? Or guilt over getting whatever was left in her bank accounts? Was there even enough love left between us to miss her? I’m not sure. But I have a feeling the way she died had a lot to do with it.
Shinju and I began our lives sharing the same primordial sea. Mum said we wrestled in her belly like Jacob and Esau, and we would’ve been named after the brotherly-love-gone-awry twins if we’d been boys. Instead, Pop had his way, naming us with the family business in mind. Even though I was born first, and in my opinion should’ve been named Shinju, meaning “pearl,” I was dubbed Kashiko — child of the seashore. Turns out Pop was prophetic. I became the pearl hunter. Shinju wore them.
Unfortunately, as the years went by, Pop’s heavy drinking wrecked our small pearl-diving business. Fewer trips out to sea meant fewer opportunities to search for oysters, resulting in smaller profits. By the time we were fifteen, he had to sell our lugger. Without the boat, the business went belly-up.
Fate smiled on my sister, though. When she was sixteen, Shinju was hired by world-renowned Broome South Sea Pearls as a jewelry model for their Aphrodite’s Tears Collection. Strands of diamonds and pearls, sapphires and pearls, platinum and pearls hung across Shinju’s back, thighs, small breasts, and even bare bum in glossy advertisements in international magazines and Australian TV commercials. Sales at Broome South Sea Pearls doubled. Two years later, you couldn’t take the bullet train in Tokyo, the subway in New York, or even sip a cup of java in a Broome coffee shop without her long black lashes and glowing white skin beckoning you like a seductive sea nymph. Men ogled her, but women idolized her, imagining if they just bought perfectly matched Broome South Sea pearls the diameter of lychee fruit, her alabaster skin and black lacquered hair would become their own.
But the fantasy didn’t last. My sister died here in Broome two months ago, the middle of January. I’d just come off a twenty-one-day stint on a pearling ship. Because I had nothing in the fridge at the one-bedroom bungalow I rent two blocks from the beach, I stopped at the Moon market at Town Beach. Bought a couple of overpriced star fruits, a package of soy nuts, and a liter of alfalfa juice. Walking home I heard sirens, but didn’t think much of it. Tourists can get crazy as a cut snake on our famous Staircase to the Moon nights.
When there’s a full moon the tides recede far from shore, exposing the mudflats in Roebuck Bay. As the moon rises, light reflects off the wet ripples in the sand, creating the illusion of glowing amber steps shimmering straight up to the moon. Tourists overrun Broome every month to see the Staircase to the Moon. Turns out an American couple on their honeymoon found my sister’s body on the beach. I don’t care for tourists much, but still, I wouldn’t want a death haunting my anniversary.
Pop rang me at 1 A.M. When he whimpered the news about Shinju, I couldn’t breathe. Then I remembered I woke up gasping two nights before in my bunk on the Adelaide. The clock had glowed 10:42 P.M.
Some say identical twins have a special connection. Like telepathy, or ESP. Shinju and I had such ties: unknowingly buying the same outfits, the same bikinis; carrying on conversations without speaking a word; making the same grades on exams in school. Falling for the same boy in Year 9.
Others say it’s bunk — there’s no science to prove twins can sense each other’s feelings and thoughts. But then how would they explain last October, when a horrifying dream woke me? My hands were cold and clammy and my heart flopped around in my chest like a dying fish. I saw Shinju’s face, bloodless and still, floating across my bungalow ceiling. I knew it wasn’t my face — hers was perfect. Mine has a scar stretching from the temple to the corner of my lip.
I forced myself to sit up, grab the phone, and ring my parents.
“Call Shinju in Sydney,” I said. “If there’s no answer, ring the police. And make damn sure they send for an ambulance.”
Mum didn’t ask questions. She knew the bond Shinju and I shared. Her call saved Shinju’s life. She’d snorted enough cocaine to kill a bloody roo, then chased it down with six cold ones — Victoria Bitter, her favorite from the old days in Broome. Blamed me for news of her addiction becoming social gossip, and her employer, BSSP, warning her not to let it happen again.
Was it that same connection that woke me on the Adelaide? Was 10:42 the time of her death? I decided not to share my morbid thoughts with Pop when he called that night. Instead I told him not to worry, I’d take care of everything at the coroner’s office in the morning. Pop hadn’t been back on the wagon long enough to be able to say to the coroner, “Yes, this sea-battered body belongs to my little pearl.” But after ringing off, I was restless. I pulled on jeans and a T-shirt, slid into a jacket, and grabbed the keys. But once I straddled the bike, my hands started to shake. I couldn’t slip the key into the ignition.