Specimen & Other Stories (2 page)

The doorbell rang. It was Wild Bill, come to
town for his once-a-week grocery run, during which he invariably
dropped his wife off at the local health food store while he popped
around the corner to shoot the breeze and share a joint with me. As
was his custom, it was already dangling from his mouth, his lighter
cocked in his right hand ready for ignition. As he ambled in, he
said, “Whew, that’s some funky-smelling shit, man, you need to open
a window and vent this place out.” But before I could say, wait,
don’t light that up in here, he flicked his lighter and a tiny
flame erupted in a fiery cloud of gas.

They said the blast was heard a dozen blocks
away. A fire truck was there in minutes, followed shortly
thereafter by a hazardous materials unit and an ambulance, and
later by the police and the arson squad. Wild Bill and I were
released from the hospital that evening, after criminal intentions
had been ruled out, suffering only minor burns incurred at
ground-zero of what the haz-mat team called a low-concentration
methane explosion of organic origins. I returned to my apartment,
whose broken windows had been temporarily sealed with sheets of
plastic. I opened two of the windows to create a cross-draught and
set a place for dinner at the kitchen table. I pureed one banana in
the blender to make soup, ate two more normally as the main dish,
and diced the last one to eat for dessert. Exhausted but full, I
went to bed.

Aside from the diabolic wind, I slept well,
and on awakening to the smell of rotten banana skins, I emptied the
garbage and swore that occult vegetarian diets would no longer be a
part of this writer’s lifestyle. From this day forth, I resolved to
revert to my omnivorous ways. With the dawning of a new day and a
new lease on life, I hastened off to my favorite breakfast joint
and ordered one of everything on the menu – eggs, bacon, sausage,
ham, grits, beans, cereal, muffin, hash browns, toast, and a big
pot of coffee.

Recognizing a ravenous man when she saw one,
the waitress asked me, “Do you want a fruit cup with that?”

After a moment’s hesitation I said, “Yes,
but hold the bananas.”

~~~~~~~~~

Ken liked it at the Mercury Café. No one
there knew he was a killer. He could drop in for a coffee and a
date square and sit in one of their dumpy club chairs and read the
newspaper. No one would be talking business – explaining to him
their beef with someone, and asking him how much it’d cost to have
their beef turned into hamburger.

It was a slack day and he had time on his
hands. He took out his mechanical pencil – a beautiful red Pentel
he’d taken from an accountant who’d borrowed far more cocaine money
than he’d budgeted for – and worked on a Sudoku puzzle. It was a
beginner’s level because he wasn’t that good with numbers and if he
got frustrated and started to hear the voices of his grade school
math teacher echoing in his head, terrible things could happen.

As he worked on his puzzle, he nibbled on a
date square. He patronized the Mercury Café because of their
perfect date squares. If she weren’t dead, he could have believed
his mother had made them. They had just the right amount of date
filling, husk-free and not too sweet. They stuck together
perfectly, so he could hold one in his free hand and eat it until
it was gone and it wouldn’t fall apart on him. Some of these other
places, you needed a whisk broom to finish the damn things.

He was sitting in his favorite chair in the
back corner when these two kids came in. The guy was maybe 21, 22,
but looked like he’d got stuck in high school mode and couldn’t
squirm out of it. He had a skateboard in one hand and a can of Red
Bull in the other, tats up and down his arms and calves, wearing a
T-shirt and a pair of those ridiculous baggy pants that came down
to just below the knee.

There was a girl with him, she looked maybe
19 but stretching for a few years beyond, like she couldn’t wait to
graduate from being a kid and turn into a beautiful young woman.
She wore a sleeveless white cotton summer dress, briefly
translucent as she was framed in the sunny entrance, and had a
thick tangle of blonde hair that obscured her face.

They stood at the counter while the guy
ordered a couple of coffees from the barrista. End of the
afternoon, the place was pretty busy and the good seats in the
front half of the café were already taken, so after they cased the
joint and came to the same conclusion, they walked into the back
and sat on the old sofa that was kitty-corner to him.

The guy propped his skateboard against the
sofa and put his feet on the coffee table. The girl sat beside him,
but closer to Ken, keeping her knees together and smoothing her
dress around her thighs as she settled in. Her tanned legs were the
color of coffee ice cream. She carefully removed the lid from her
takeout cup, took a brief sip and grimaced at the heat. She blew on
the surface of the coffee and Ken noticed how pretty her lips were,
pursed like that, as if she were blowing a kiss.

“Are you coming to Mom’s birthday party?”
she asked the guy with her.

“I dunno. I want to go to a party in
Oakville.”

“That skank you met on Facebook?” she
said.

Annoying rap music erupted from somewhere
inside the guy’s pants. He pulled out a cell phone and said,
“Whazzup, bro?”

It turned into a long conversation,
something about a girl that the caller had a hardon for, but it was
apparently going nowhere fast...

Ken knew the feeling. Women didn’t dig him.
It was like they had a sixth sense, they looked at his hands and
knew he’d done so many bad things with them, and they couldn’t
stand the thought of him touching them, and they ran away as fast
as he appeared on their horizon. He could write a book about
unrequited love.

“Are you finished with that section of the
paper?” the girl asked him.

Ken looked at her. She was looking at him.
Her eyes were like emeralds with lights behind them. He was
blinded, like a raccoon in the middle of the road, and a Jaguar
bearing down on him.
Whump
. That was the sound of her tires
running over his heart.

“Uh, yeah. Help yourself.”

She took the newspaper, the Entertainment
section, and began to read the cover story.

Ken looked at the numbers on the Sudoku grid
and couldn’t make sense of anything. His mind was like one of those
paperweights that had been shaken, little snowflakes cascading down
upon a landscape vaguely familiar and strange, hiding his tracks so
that he wasn’t sure how he’d actually got here or how he was going
to get home again.

The guy was still talking on the phone. Ken
couldn’t believe how rude he was, ignoring the girl beside him. He
understood from their three-line dialogue they were probably
brother and sister, not boyfriend and girlfriend, but still. People
with cell phones didn’t deserve to have friends, or family for that
matter, if they were going to behave so badly.

Some days when Ken was in a bad mood he made
lists of people he would kill for free. People who abused and
abandoned their pets. Drivers who didn’t signal their turns. People
who tossed litter on the sidewalks. Owners of very expensive cars
who always seemed to have handicapped placards on their dashboards
so they could park where they pleased.

He looked at her again and wracked his brain
for something to say. Her beauty was a frightening hurdle, like a
mountain in the distance that he wanted to climb but knew that he
would run out of oxygen and die before he reached its peak.

She turned the page in the newspaper, picked
up her coffee, sipped it again, and her eyes drifted briefly his
way.

“Would you like a date square?” he said to
her, regretting it immediately. Could he have picked anything more
ridiculous to say?

She looked at him and after a moment a
crooked little smile appeared on her lips. “Who you calling a
square?”

It took him a few seconds before he got it.
Word play. She was messing with him. He liked that. His heart
started pounding like a big bass drum.

“You’d never make it as a square,” he said.
“Too many curves.”

“The better to roll with the punches,” she
said.

“Anyone punched you,” he said, “I’d tear
their arms off and club them to death with the stumps.”

“Ooh, that’s the nicest thing anyone’s said
to me all day.”

“Did I...? Oh, I’m sorry. I thought I was
only thinking it. Sometimes things slip out.”

“Yes, I know. It’s like that motherfucking
Tourette’s Syndrome. Don’t you just hate when that happens?”

“Don’t get me started. There are so many
things to hate.”

“You know what pisses me off?” she said.
“Take a walk along Avenue Road, see how so many handicapped people
seem to drive a BMW, a Mercedes or a Porsche. I’d like to line up
the doctors who signed those permits and run over their legs with a
bulldozer.”

Ken couldn’t believe his ears. It was both
shocking and exciting to hear someone who thought so much like him.
He stood up, but he wasn’t sure whether he should walk or run away.
The last time he’d expressed an attraction for a woman, she’d
called 911.

“Would you like something? Date square,
chocolate brownie, macadamia nut cookie...?”

“What? I thought you were asking me for a
date. Now who’s square?”

He stared down at her. Was she still messing
with him? This was worse than Sudoku. The numbers didn’t add up.
She was beautiful and innocent, and he was a beast with homicidal
hands. What kind of children would they have?

Ken looked from her to the other end of the
sofa, where the guy was now curled up like a pretzel, still on the
phone. “I wouldn’t have said something like that, not when you’re
with someone.”

She made a dismissive wave. “My idiot
brother?” She looked at her watch. “We were supposed to catch up,
on account of we haven’t seen each other, for like a month, but
he’s been on the phone all this time and now my break’s over and
I’ve got to get back to work.”

“Where’s that?”

“The Gap on the next block.”

She stood up, made the universal
thumb-and-pinkie signal to her brother.
Call me, asshole
.
And walked out.

Ken followed her into the sunlight. Briefly,
it was like something out of a movie, where the earthlings step out
of the spaceship and the new world is all bright and shiny and
marvelous and they know somehow everything’s going to be all
right.

He saw it too late to warn her. Some idiot
had left a juice bottle lying on the second step. She slipped on it
and would have taken a header onto the sidewalk if Ken hadn’t
reached out with reptilian reflex and grabbed her bicep in his
hand. He held her steady until she was on the sidewalk.

“Oh my God, your hands are so amazingly
strong.” She looked up at him with gratitude. “And warm.”

“Thank you.”

“You can let go now.”

“Sorry.” His mother had always said, you
find what you want in life, you hold onto it tight and never let it
go. He wondered about that sometimes, and why she hadn’t held onto
her own life, instead of spiraling down the drain in a swirl of
cheap wine.

“I’ve got to get back to work.” She pointed
down the street.

“What’s your name?”

“Barb.”

“I’m Ken.”

“Barbie and Ken.” She smiled. “My friends
are going to rip me a new one over that.”

It took him a few moments before he got it.
Was she making fun of him? He looked at her, still standing there,
smiling with teeth from a dental ad, waiting for him to say
something clever...

“What time do you get off work?”

“Six.”

“Would you like to go to dinner with
me?”

“Only if you’ve got a lot of money, because
I am really hungry. Not to mention, thirsty.”

“I have money.” It had been a good month.
He’d killed two guys and he had another one to do this afternoon,
although he wouldn’t get paid until tomorrow.

“If you’ve got the money, honey, I got the
time.”

Ken had to control himself from having a
nostalgic meltdown right then and there. His mother used to sing
that song when he was a kid, and waltz him off his feet around the
kitchen in their shitty little two-bedroom apartment, until he got
too big for her and she got too drunk to dance.

Ken looked at his watch. “How about if I
meet you right back here when you get off work?”

“Deal.” She offered her hand.

Reluctantly, he shook hands with her,
feeling her little palm swallowed up inside his big paw. Her hand
was very warm and slightly moist, like a burrito that had just come
out of the microwave.

“Okay, I’ll see you later.”

“You know, maybe I shouldn’t say this,” she
said, “but you have awesome hands. They give me the shivers, you
know, in a nice way.”

“I get that a lot,” he lied, and he knew by
the way she laughed that she knew he was full of it and she didn’t
care. She waved bye and headed off toward the Gap.

He turned and walked away. He gritted his
teeth, telling himself not to get all mushy and look back at her.
He started to hum a tune to himself, observing the debate going on
between his ears. There was the old Ken who insisted she’d stand
him up and he’d never see her again, and there was the new Ken who
believed he’d see her for dinner tonight, and then who knows what
could happen...

He walked back to his car, a 14-year-old
white Volvo – solid, dependable and unremarkable, very much like
himself. He got inside and drove across town to Danforth Avenue
where he parked on Logan in the heart of Greektown. It was
wall-to-wall restaurants and bars and cafés for half a dozen blocks
along this stretch. It was a warm and sunny September afternoon and
there were lots of people on the terraces. He found the restaurant
he wanted and went inside and saw the guy sitting there with a
couple of friends. He was wearing a yellow shirt that stuck out
like a banana in a cornfield. Perfect.