THUGLIT Issue One (10 page)

Darly swung the gun at him. Something struggled unsaid behind the stitch of her lips. The affectionate interest in her eyes was now a desperate hunger.

“She shot Andrea is what’s going on,” Chrissie said, a lifetime of Benson & Hedges croaking her tone. “Shot her own mother. Put her in a coma.”

“Shut up,” Darly said, snapping the Magnum back at Chrissie.

“Might’ve killed her. Might’ve killed her own mother.”

“Shut up!”

“Darly,” Big Dan began. The gun’s aim cut him off, almost swayed him. His body felt like brick, head like a balloon, chest burning.

“I came here to tell you because you must’ve changed your damn phone number on us again,” Chrissie said. Big Dan ignored her. He cared only for his granddaughter, beautiful and rabid, and for getting out with her.

“Darly, we can still work this out,” he said, forcing his legs forward. They managed one step. It made the women flinch.

“How? Lawyers?” Darly smiled, all sweet poison. “You’d lose.”

“We can just get out of here,” Big Dan said, demanding another step but failing.

“Are you serious?” Chrissie yelled. “She shot
Andrea
,
Pa
! She’s going to prison!”

“I’d take care of you,” Big Dan said.

Darly’s stare softened. He stepped toward it.

Softness only survived a moment. The blaze came back to her eyes, hotter than before, with pain fueling it.

“I’ve heard that before,” Darly said, smile twitching as something in her fractured, “from my bitch of a mother.”

Big Dan reached. Darly’s gun boomed.

He came to after a long instant like snipped film. His cheek was on the Milanese tile. His body felt like someone else’s.

The stink of cordite, car fluid, and the sweet penny smell of blood stained everything he breathed.

Chrissie lay a few feet away, eyes gaping like the fist-sized hole in her throat. He could hear the front door open. The storm howled in Darly’s exit.

Big Dan gathered his breaths. Each had to be wrestled in. Each brought more strength. He collected enough to try taking his feet.

It took half a minute—shoving his palms into the blood gumming the floor, bending his knees, head screaming like it had when his Pa lashed him.

He fell.

He breathed deep twice.

He fought up again.

Big Dan’s house wheeled around him as he went upright and staggered for the door. He let it spin. He let his nerves scream and collapse. He had to get to Darly.

She was escape. Life. Salvation for them both.

The rain embraced him with a beating: Punched his head. Pushed his shoulders. Yelled into the pits of his ears.

He wouldn’t let his old man beat him this time—the girl was still in sight.

Darly jogged ahead through toxic mire that gripped over her ankles. She’d made it to Chrissie’s
Toyota
truck parked under the Potter Chevy sign. Big Dan failed to call out, lungs filled with caulk.

She fumbled at the lock.

He forced shuffle after shuffle through the sludge, until his boot hit highway tarmac.

She wrenched the door open.

He drove himself faster.

She was haloed by the interior light, face bright as a baby photo, eyes just like his.

He fought words out.

“Darly! Take me with you!”

The fight robbed his wind. His next step faltered. His knees broke the flood mire, buckled on the highway, pitched him forward.

Darly looked back in time to watch Big Dan fall.

He watched, face half in the muck, as she slid into the
Toyota
without pausing and started it up.

He tried to watch her drive away. Tried harder than he ever had at anything. Needed to see if she at least looked back.

The flood rose to shut his open eyes.

b
y
Mike Wilkerson

Waiting for her.

Hours spent kneeling and praying with her paperback copy of Falconer in my hands, the book’s cover speckled black with her blood. The terrazzo floor is cold and hard beneath knees raw and burning. Unrelenting, I rest my head on the edge of the bed’s bare mattress, close my eyes and wait for her.

Fading. Booze and Morpheus proceed to conspire against me, allowing only micro-second cuts, flashbacks of a final blinding glance. Numbers blip on a gas pump as Audrey smiles at me through the passenger side window, holding the book she’s been reading to her chest, the white sun on her mahogany skin. I can smell the sweetness of her perfume cutting through the thick vapor of oil and gas and stink of this world.

Eyes flickering. Images floating.

The world’s gone red and I’m reaching, grabbing for her. She’s only a few steps away but like lost halcyon days, never within my grasp.

Spinning free.

*****

St. Petersburg
,
Florida
—
Tuesday, July 10th, 1979

The phone ringing and cutting cathartic tendencies short. I grab the receiver and check the time on a glowing bedside clock—
11:00
—straight up.

“Yeah.”

“
Preston Street
. Head south off 15th Avenue, a few houses up on your left. Little white shack, bare yard, maroon Crown Vic in the drive. You’ll know it when you see it. Back door opens into the kitchen.”

Standing and straightening out stiffened knees. Tender skin breaks open and blood trickles down my shins and seeps through brown gabardine pants. The pain feels good.

“How many?”

Freddy sniffs. “Two Bloods and a skinny-ass whitebread. Cats be strapped and straight up flyin'. Bad scene, my brotha.”

“Whitebread—the cousin?”

A grunt. “Dig it.  Half-assed prison tats on both forearms. Lightning bolts and I do mean
Shazam!
mothafucka.”

“My nigga.”

Freddy sneezes. “Just remember that, cuz.”

My pulse spikes as the connection buzzes a flatline. I drop the phone, slip on my shoes and grab a black, sweat-streaked t-shirt from a month-old pile of dirty clothes. I don’t even notice the sour aroma of body odor anymore.

Two clean throwdown pieces sit next to a battered gold shield on my dining room table. I clip the shield to my belt and then remember where I’m going, what I’m preparing to do and the price I’m willing to pay.

What I’ve already paid.

Past and present collide and my head does a drunken dizzy dance. I throw the television through the living room wall. Picture tubes explode. Chunks of plaster scatter across the floor and dust fills the air. I toss my shield into the wreckage and grab the hardware, goose a line of flake off the kitchen counter and make my way out the door.

Rolling. Constricted capillaries distend to make room for the river of blood gushing through my veins. Scenarios circulating. She’s been missing going on three days straight, her country bumpkin jailbird cousin off the grid just as long—and alive or dead, she’s already a statistic.

Childhood gone.

Innocence gone.

Morning headlines:

POOR JENNY HUGHES, TWELVE YEARS
             
OLD AND JUST PLAIN GONE.

I grab another gear, drop the pedal, kill the yellow light at
34th Street
.

Running east on
15th Avenue South
. Hot. This city at night is a sweat lodge and visions appear in the darkness which I know aren’t there—hope in the faces of the hard young brothers who sit on front porch stoops of cribs gone to wrack and ruin. They’re guzzling malt liquor out of bumpers wrapped in brown paper bags. They’re smoking Kool Milds. They’re yapping about poontang. They see me with anxious eyes but don’t care unless I’m buying. The dollar rules, along with despair and destitution.

Teeth gnashing. Perspiration flows down my back and I’m sweat-stuck to the seat as I ease my foot down on the gas, the rumbling of the 'Cuda’s Hemi losing the battle against fleeting minutes screaming
Tick!—Tick!—Tick!
in my ears even as a realization begins pounding in my skull:

I didn’t call in backup because I’ve got no one left.

I’ve burned all the bridges.

Chances taken will belong only to me.

*****

Regret drives me. I’d given up being a husband to Audrey a year earlier. The detective shield changed everything. Days, weeks at a time away from her, 1976 as a stone blur. Faces—dead faces and scared faces and blank faces crippled me. Shakedowns and kickbacks were justified in my mind to ease the pain, making myself believe I was right.

I ran the gamut even as the grind wore me down. I didn’t sleep. I didn’t eat. But against my will, she held me together.

She held me together until she fell apart. 

*****

Childhood stomping grounds revisited.

Preston Street
. Beneath the untrimmed Sabal Palmetto trees and shabby live oaks, faded turquoise and peach-colored houses loiter on barren sandy yards. Rusty bicycles with flat tires and busted chains
.
  Old po
ts and pans filled with typhoid-
infested water being lapped up by oversized mutts on log chains. Trash strewn from here to fucking there.

I cruise by my destination at an idle, a tiny clapboard bungalow with peeling white paint and aluminum foil taped to the windows, a shroud for keeping the heat out or the glare of violence in. I don’t stare and I don’t slow down. I scope the scene—this burg is disco dead. Check it—I’m just another
Southside nigger out for a late-
night joyride.

One block down, I park in front of a vacant lot void of spillover light from street lamps and kill the engine. One more hit and the blow clears my head, amplifies minutes giving way to seconds yelling
TICK!—TICK!—TICK!
while sweat runs down my nose and onto the hardware as I re-check their loads by feel in the darkness.

Ready—the
.45 in
my hand, the .357 backup strapped to my ankle. Jaw clamped shut, teeth ready to crack and implications leapfrogging in my head as I open the car door, knowing I’ve got this one last chance to stop, call it in and do this on the level.

My feet hit the ground and I’m running across the street, sprinting and tripping my way through a backyard overgrown with crabgrass clumps and scruffy orange trees. Limbs slap my face, scrape my arms. The gun is light in my hand and those scenarios and implications are winding on a closed circuit.

Knowing.

I’ve got one last chance to make this right.

*****

Friday, May 1st,
1977
. A
seven-
hour trip would put us in
Atlanta
,
Georgia
, Audrey’s
hometown. Friends. Family. Home-
cooked meals. I got off early on a Wednesday and we would leave that same day.

Audrey met me at the front door, almond-shaped eyes like green pools of water and a smile on her face, the first one I’d noticed in months.

Me, making up lost time: We made love before leaving and she cried in my arms.

Me, making up lies: “Things will change, baby.  I promise."

*****

Humping it over chai
n-
link fences, my heart working like a piston in a top fuel sled. Trash cans bang together as feral cats squeal and dance across their metal lids. A backyard dog goes stone batshit.

A kid’s voice from somewhere behind me says, “Who dat?”

A mother responds: “You’s don’t be worrying about who’s out there. You’s just get yo black ass inside and shut dat window!”

One more backyard, one more fence and I’ve reached the bungalow, sucking air while staring at a back door painted red. I feel like a sinner entering hell for the first and last time.

I steady my breathing and ask God if He’s listening.

He doesn’t answer.

I take the silence as approval and kick the door off its fucking hinges.

*****

I was inside paying for gas and buying Audrey a Dr. Pepper when I heard t
he spattering of shots fired. AK
-47 on full auto. I sprinted outside
. A blue Chevy Impala with dirt-
covered plates laid rubber out into
34th Street
traffic. People scrambling and screaming, horns blowing.

Dead in my tracks.

Her blood sprayed onto the passenger side window.

On my knees in a lake of shattered glass, holding her in my arms.

Her blood sprayed everywhere.

*****

Sightline. On
a gold velour couch sits a fat-
ass Blood with a lopsided fro and wearing a red shirt the size of a tent. He’s eating ice cream from the container. Next to him sprawls a rail-thin and shirtless white boy with blue tattoos on his forearms. Lightning bolts. They’re hittin’. They’re buzzin’. The glass-topped coffee table in front of them is stacked with dope and guns. The air inside smells stale, dead.

Chaos as I cross the kitchen into the front room. Music blaring and lava lamps burning low buffer the two stunned faces with glassy jaundiced eyes. Tunnel vision as the .45 spits—two in the face, and the juiced-up cracker’s shaved head snaps back, a bloody halo spattering on the white wall behind him like a repulsive modern art masterpiece. I want to linger. I want to ask him why.

Ears ringing as I take another step.

Fat Albert’s stuck in the couch, trembling and struggling to get on his feet. Garbled sounds are coming from his mouth. He takes two in the chest with a jerk. He coughs up a glob of blood into his ice cream before falling sideways into his partner’s lap with a confused and questioning look on his bulging face.

Head spinning, blood pounding.

Thinking is a liability. I forego the temptation as I haul ass through an open bedroom door to my left, .45 leveled in front of me and jumping headlong into the kind of nightmare I foolishly believed could exist only for me.

I don’t want to see her like this.

I don’t want to see Jenny Hughes laid bare and tied to the bed with the soiled white sheets turned cherry beneath her. I don’t want to see her soaking wet hair, dark and stringy while sticking to her face and mouth. I don’t want to see the yellowing bruises on the soft alabaster skin of her thrashing arms and legs.

I only want to fall away; for a minute, a day.

A goddamn lifetime.

Strobes of light begin pulsating in my head and the dizziness is back along with a nauseous clarity. The bright-as-day room. The bed. The cheap, walnut-veneered chest of drawers with the busted mirror shoved against a jizz-stained eggshell-white wall. The girl and the empty bottles of codeine-laden cough syrup they’ve forced down her throat.

Me.

Everyone and everything is in their place, but only the sight of him has stopped my world from spinning out of control on its greased-up axis. 

And he’s straight zoned.

Big Stud Blood’s in his birthday suit, holding a twelve-gauge pump and fumbling with fat red shells. His feet are moving like he’s standing on burning hot coals and he’s not even paying attention to what’s in front of him—because with his posse out front no one should’ve ever made it this far. 

His eyes find me, blink once, twice and then go “OH MY GOD!” wide. 

*****

I knew the reasons why, knew the potential implications. The kickbacks. The shakedowns. The time away from Audrey spent living another life, making the excuse that I was owed the money I took. Like a rodent, I’d taken the cheddar from their hands and then tried to turn full circle on the very men who paid me to keep my mouth shut. I was naïve. I thought I could walk away from the game without consequence.

I thought the badge meant I was untouchable.

*****

Scared—another strange face and the girl is screaming bloody fucking murder. I put one in Stud’s thigh. He drops. He cries. Arterial damage and a bloody geyser erupts.

Move—

My pocketknife slices through the ropes. She rolls up in a ball, covering herself down there. My hand on her shoulder and Jenny balls up tighter. She’s so small.