On any given night in this cheap diner on the track, a girl might be crying on the pay phone, another girl in the bathroom might be pissing blood from a beating she got the night before, another girl sitting in one of the horseshoe-shaped booths at the front might be adjusting her waist-length hair to hide the crisscrossing of stitches on her head from a bad date’s crowbar, and groups of women with brand-new breasts might be discussing the pros and cons of enlargement surgery with those who haven’t yet had the procedure, saying things like, Yeah, now I got no feeling in my nipples. But, you know, whatever. Discussing the merits of different brands of hairspray, laughing at anyone gauche enough to use one bought at a drugstore, or rolling in the aisles like professional wrestlers, one woman vice-gripping another in her long, lean, tanning-salon-perfect thighs, before grabbing a sugar canister and bringing it down on the other girl’s head, knocking over a gashed stool that’s been repaired with yellow police tape.
Squashed in like this, I can’t move my elbows. This gives me an excuse not to reach for the picture Paula tries to pass me, but it makes no difference to her. She lays it faceup on the table for everyone to see.
I notice burns around his nipples. Angry red circles outlined with black, charred flesh in the center. More on his inner thighs, his balls. They look like smallpox, the pictures I’ve seen in books of dying people. She passes me another one of them pouring gross stuff on him like ketchup and motor oil. Her and her friend Sherri. I can’t imagine how much that must have hurt, stinging its way into his burns, his open wounds.
Paula makes me sick. The kind of sick that makes you want to punch someone and walk away.
Next they light more cigarettes and run them over his body, little burning caterpillars leaving ash trails.
At this point in the story, part of me wants to get up and leave.
So many burns that his body looks disfigured, twisted in discomfort. You can’t see his expression in any of these pictures. You can see his face — that there is one — but not enough to tell what he’s thinking. Can you ever?
He isn’t smiling, and he isn’t asleep, even though in some of the pictures his eyes are closed and his head is craned to the right, away from the camera. But his arched body gives away that he is awake with pain.
There are no pictures of the flames. But there are pictures of what he looked like afterward.
Paula and Andrea keep passing the photo back and forth silently.
I begin to cry without meaning to, the way your eyes water when you’re really mad.
“Mother Teresa, here,” Paula says.
They stole everything they could carry away. They took his microwave and stereo and paintings off the walls. They took his lamps and barware. Sculptures they liked and sculptures they didn’t like. They loaded it into Paula’s car, and before the lawyer passed out he told them the combination for the safe.
I admire Andrea’s thick skin. Her internal fortitude. Paula shows me another photo.
“How much did you guys get?” Andrea says, her eyes beaming.
“Who cares?” I say. “Seriously.”
“Who cares?” Paula repeats. “What the hell?” She said it like you’d say, Bird shit? Bird shit on my windshield?
“Keep your shitty pictures,” I say.
“I don’t think I could do that,” Deb finally speaks, “no matter the money.”
Paula beams. “That’s why I’m me and you’re you.” She pauses. “Thank God.”
What power does Paula think this gives her over Deb? Part of me understands not wanting to be broken. But if Paula thinks Deb now regards her with awe, she is wrong.
“Did you leave him there?” I ask, changing the subject. I haven’t come here to give Paula any glory.
“Yeah, duh.”
“Fuckin’ barbecue,” I say. I want to be hard. I want to be tough.
“God, that’s gross,” Paula says, like I’m the witch.
I swallow. “I guess it takes all kinds,” I say. Did I mean him asking for it, or her giving it to him?
“He wanted us to.”
If someone asked me to set them on fire. To kill them. Let them die. What would I do? “Did you at least call 911?” I say to everyone at the table.
Deb hugs me. The waitress comes to take our orders. Andrea gawks at me as if I’m joking. But some days the world’s beauty hurts. You have to let it. Not care who sees. Who hears.
Deb rubs my shoulder.
“We put out the fire, stupid. What do you think? We killed him?”
“Let it out,” Deb says. “That’s right.”
Deb would have called 911. Deb would have waited with him until the ambulance arrived.
“Then, get this,” Paula nudges me with her elbow, “he actually says thank you.”
All’s I know is this. It’s been three days since Paula and Sherri did that date. Sherri’s still not back at work. Maybe they made so much money she’s able to take the time off. Or maybe the experience screwed her up. I don’t know which. Do you always give someone exactly what they want? Certain experiences turn us into people we never thought we could be.
“You make love like a woman,” Deb says, imitating A.C. again. “So what’s that mean? Paula’s not a woman?”
I think of the photos. I tell Deb she better watch her back.
Part III
Night Visions
The Demon of Steveston
by Kristi Charish
Britannia
I crouched down over the white plastic bag and carefully teased it away from the baby formula bottles, all sealed, still filled with the grayish-beige liquid.
“The formula might be what did it,” I said, surveying the cordoned-off docks for the fourth time, trying my best not to look at the body or the open dead eyes, lined with a smattering of heavy, dark eyelashes. “Unnerved them. I can’t see why else they’d leave the body here.” I stood with a small groan, my rubber shoe taps scuffing against the dew-laced dock. The plastic bags stirred with the morning breeze that buffeted the sea grass flats off the Britannia shipyards. “That or the milk stains.”
“Jesus Christ,” Murray whispered, more prayer than statement.
I shoved my hands in my pocket to keep Murray from seeing them fidget. I suspected he’d called me out here for charity more than necessity, but still I felt obligated to muster my best. I squinted against the sunlight coming off the water, only now high enough to sting my eyes, and tried remembering the last time I was up at daybreak. I didn’t feel the need to apologize for the cigarette I lit, stashed in my pocket months ago for a rainy day.
Or a dead body.
“Runaway, prostitute — or a little of both?” Murray asked.
A long drag did wonders to calm my jitters. I forced myself to scan the woman’s meager possessions once again — and then her.
Young Asian woman, hair bleached within an inch of its life, small frame yet I’d guess athletic. Dressed in a vintage-looking cargo jacket, combat boots, and a matching canvas backpack lying off to the side. Her skin only now starting to lose color. Not dead long.