Nothing is a lie if you truly believe it.
Only I couldn’t.
Booze and blow, blow and booze. I’d left a running tab with Full Time Freddy and orders to keep product coming until my funds dried up and my credit was gone.
Till there is nothing left.
Drifting. Days turning into weeks of highs and lows, fear and depravation. The phone ringing, me hiding-paranoia at its zenith: It’s Audrey and she knows about my transgressions. The sweet Lord has told her why our lives turned out this way and now she’s angry. She wants to hear the truth from me.
Two weeks in, I rip the phone cord from the wall. It still rings. I chug bourbon. I loop one end of the cord around my neck, the other around a bedpost. Ease into it. Feel that cord go tight around my neck. Feel my head getting light. Feel that badass floating sensation.
Feel that cheap-ass cord go snap!
On my feet and screaming: “Now what, nigga!”
Flip the bed over. Turn the chest of drawers into kindling. Beat your head against the wall until blood’s running in your eyes and down your chin.
Blood blind and raging: “Now what nigga!”
Closet, top shelf. Grab the 9mm, shove it in your eye, pull the trigger-click-click-click. Check the clip and stare in disbelief-what clip?
On my knees, blood dripping on the floor, nothing left. I taste the blood on my lips and mutter to someone I used to know: “Now what nigga?”
Five weeks and fifteen lost pounds later, I hear a knock at the door. Judas window view gives me little Jenny Hughes standing on the concrete landing in a little pink dress and little black shoes over frilly white socks, hands behind her back. The world behind and around her is a radiant summer yellow and hurts my eyes.
I hesitate. I run my sticky tongue over sticky teeth. I haven’t showered or shaved in weeks. The living room is a reeking pigsty. Delivery food boxes filled with moldy food litter the house. Empty bottles of booze stand like desert sentinels watching over the drifts of coke residue on the coffee table. Curtains pulled. Room dark. The a/c is turned down to seventy, countering the subtropical heat outside and I’m freezing.
Hand on the doorknob. My teeth rattle with the cocaine shakes as a voice inside my head begs: “Please don’t do it!”
Betraying myself-you crazy looped-up nigger.
I open the door and Jenny walks in with a large manila envelope appearing in her hand. She turns on a living room lamp I haven’t used for a year.
Pushing a pizza box aside, I sit on the couch and wrap myself in a blanket. Jenny’s picked a picture off the coffee table. Two faces I don’t recognize anymore are smiling against the backdrop of a blue clear sky. She puts the picture down, looks at the hole in the wall and the mess on the floor I never bothered to clean up. Then she turns to me, speaking in a voice as timid as she is small.
“I wanted to die, you know. All that time. I’m scared most all the time, even now, Mr. James. I still don’t sleep so well and my stomach always hurts…but I know…” She stops and bunches her eyebrows and tightens her lips as if she’s searching for a word or an answer and hoping maybe I can provide one or the other.
And then it starts, her tiny hands gripping her pink dress. She’s pleading with me.
“Hmmmmmmmmmm.”
She can’t stop and she’s looking at me and I’m falling apart at the fucking seams. I want to ask how she knows my name, how she found me and how I can possibly respond to the horror she’s been through and will continue to go through. Only I can’t look at her, can’t talk to her. All I can hear is her throbbing hum. My hands go to my ears and I press down tight.
Her hand falls light on my arm. I push her away until she puts both arms around me and pulls me close and I’m crying like a baby on her shoulder, telling my life’s story to a twelve-year-old girl.
Audrey.
The money.
The bloody reprisal.
All of it.
Twenty minutes go by before I can pull myself together. Jenny’s stopped humming, but doesn’t say a word. She doesn’t tell me everything will be okay.
Before leaving, Jenny hands me the envelope. I follow her to the door and see a car waiting for her. Sergeant Brice at the wheel of a navy blue unmarked. He gives me a wave. I hold up my hand and watch the two of them drive away into a bleached-out horizon.
I open the envelope. A school photo of Jenny. Her dark brown hair in pigtail braids with something passing itself off as a smile drifting across her pale face like clouds moving across the sun. She’s trying to tell me everything is all right, only those baby blue eyes deceive and fail to contain her innocuous lies.
I turn my eyes up to the bright sky and then to the brilliant colors of white blossom oleander and rusty crotons growing in my own and neighboring lawns. The sun is warm on my face.
I put the picture back in its envelope, go inside and lock the door. When once again safe in the darkness of my bedroom, I slip Jenny’s photograph into Audrey’s book and proceed to drink and pray and hate myself into a sweet and bottomless oblivion.
Two months down and the cycle repeats itself. I try to right the wrongs. For myself. For others. I hope life will work out for people like Jenny at least.
I live off my hope.
Exercise has taken the place of hate. No, nothing can fully take the place of that. I try, though. I take long runs and I lift weights and I sweat out the anger. Some of it, anyhow.
I’ve talked hours with my old Sarge over beers and bourbon. Brice confessed how he knew it was me who found the Hughes girl. Said it wasn’t easy. The girl couldn’t give a useful description, save for he was black and tall and had dark wet spots the size of silver dollars on his knees. And he stunk like hell. That was all she remembered. The detectives chalked up her fuzzy memory to post traumatic shock. The girl was safe, the bad guys were dead and the case was put in the back of a random file cabinet somewhere downtown.
Only Brice put the timing of my exit from the force and Jenny’s scant description to work. He knew the whole story that morning I stood in his office. My knees. My car. My fetid smell. But he let it die a fast death on an official level.
A few weeks later he showed my picture to the girl and now the three of us hold a secret bonded in blood.
And against doubts new and old, I still pray to God, Falconer in my hands, Audrey in my hands. My knees will never stop bleeding and the terrazzo floor will always be cold and hard. But I continue waiting, knowing full well that God and Morpheus and booze will never let me have her. I know this.
I’ll live out my days and nights reaching and grabbing for her in a blood red world left untouched evermore by a clean white sun. Audrey, only a few steps away, but never within reach. Her smile. Her clean sweet scent. Her iridescent green eyes and soft brown skin.
Halcyon days are gone forever.
Spinning free.
Luck by Johnny Shaw
Violence Cortez is not a subtle man. His nickname, neck tattoo, body language, and facial expression all communicate the same thing. The same word. The same danger. Nothing clever or open to misinterpretation for this guy. Violence is violence.