THUGLIT Issue Two (6 page)

I found the b
a
throom, which is where
most people keep their medication so they can look at themselves in t
he mirror before altering their
shitty reality. I kept the light off and, using a pen-light that I normally carried at the hospital to check on the patients at night, I scanned the vanity and drawers. Nothing. A house like this could have five or six bathrooms.

Fuck.

I kept my footsteps slow. Let each creak of the floorboards sound as natural as the wind blowing.

I found an empty bedroom with a king-sized bed. Bingo…maybe. An attached bathroom on the far side had the goods and I started loading up. I froze when I heard Gilbert’s cane rapping on the floorboards again, doused the pen light and crouched in the shower. They passed somewhere in the house and there were muffled words but they sounded far away.

I resumed my work. I took the stash.

I left the bedroom and took a turn toward a room that was bathed in gray light
streaming in from massive floor-to-
ceiling windows. There had to be more in this gothic free-for-all.

It was a wrong turn.

I came face to face with Matthew.

He started to scream. I cut the scream off with a slap to the face before I realized…

…I had walked into another house fire.

It was a Mexican standoff without the guns. The four of us stood in the dark, rich living room with only the light from the wall of windows making our faces visible to each other. Gilbert and his landscaper/errand boy, Danny, were staring me down from across the room. Matthew was in the corner, on a chair, sobbing and rubbing the side of his face where I had open-hand slapped him. Danny was getting ready to brawl.

Matthew began to pick up an old phone.

“Don’t you touch that phone, Matthew!” Gilbert snapped.

“I’m calling the police!” he cried.

“You’re not calling anyone!” Gilbert’s voice roared and I was amazed he could find the breath in his frail old body. He shook, balancing on his cane, and raged.

I could see beyond Gilbert and Danny. I could see a young, pale, adolescent face peering around the corner from the darkness. It
was the 16-year-
old boy from the newspaper, the one who had “run away” to New York.

No. There wouldn’t be any cops called out here, no way.

“Now, what the fuck are you doing in my house?” Gilbert barked.

I shook a little bag of Xanax, Percocet, Ambien and Oxies and raised my eyebrows.

“What the fuck is
he
doing in your house?” I said. The boy ducked back behind the doorway. “I think his parents might be looking for him. Or are you just making him a part of your freaky little family here?”

“I don’t need to answer to you.”

“You’re going to have to answer to somebody,” I said.

Danny was moving slowly to my right.

“Well, no one is going to find out,” Gilbert said. “Tastes between consenting adults is none of your concern.”

There was the gleam of a stainless steel blade in Da
nny’s hand. Matthew was crying.
Gilbert’s hand tightened around his gold-plated cane handle.

Then every eye in the room turned and widened and looked out the massive windows as four pickup trucks roared up the driveway, spitting gravel into the air. Suddenly, it seemed like we were all in the same boat and it was going to sink. Outside, the trucks skidded to a halt in the gravel drive. They blocked off any escape by car.

There were five men. They were big, mean-looking men, with shotguns slung over their shoulders, some of them decked out in camouflage hunting gear and all of them with bandanas covering their faces. I was sure one of them was the guy I talked to on the road because I recognized the truck. It was a posse, plain and clear, and we watched from the shadows of Gilbert’s living room. Matthew stopped sniveling and Danny’s attention was distracted away from me. I wasn’t sure what I should be paying attention to, but I decided Danny was closer and more immediate. He still had that knife in his hand.

“We’re here to end this!” one of the men called from the driveway. “This has gone far enough, you queer! We want the boy first and then we’ll deal with you, Gilbert.”

No one said anything. I watched Gilbert's face tightening in outrage and fear, as if years and years of his life had come to a malingering, oppressive point. He was a monster being hunted.

“You want to make that phone call to the police now, Gilbert?” I said, but he wasn’t paying attention to me, his fury was at the posse.

Gilbert exploded.
“You get off my property you sons of bitches!” His heavy voice bellowed in the living room.  “He is mine you bigoted fucks!  I’ll have you all on a fucking cross!”

The shotgun blast was loud and the glass wall shattered and dropped like a waterfall into the driveway. I seized the moment and grabbed both Danny’s arm and the hand that was clutching the knife.. I threw him toward the gaping window frame and he disappeared, plunging down onto the driveway. I could immediately hear the sounds of boots stomping flesh and bone and the crack of a shotgun stock to the head. Gilbert screamed again and took a step toward me. He was feeble and thin but his voice was almost overpowering. I kicked him in the chest and he fell on his back. I snatched the cane out of his hand, flipped it over so the gold handle was leveled at his chin like a golfer lining up for a drive.

“You know, Gilbert?” I said. He was suddenly silent.
“You should have kept your mouth shut.”

I teed off on him. His lower jaw nearly went
across the room. He
lay there in shock, looking like something out of a horror movie, his tongue wagging in the air. Now at least, he looked like a monster.

Matthew was gone and I heard the posse kicking in the door. I scrambled through the doorway where I had seen the kid. The house was like some gothic maze and there were hallways and doors everywhere. I just knew that I had to get to the rear of the house.
There was nothing I could do about Matthew. I had to cut my losses. Maybe he would survive this and tell what happened, maybe he wouldn’t. Either way, I doubted that I would get out of this fire without being burned… third degree.

Another shotgun blast went off inside the house and my ears were ringing. The halls were closing in on me. I passed by a room on my right and saw a ghost-like image in the haunted castle. It was the boy, cowering in the corner, pale and skinny and shaggy, dressed only in a t-shirt and boxer shorts. I figured I could salvage something out of this mess.

I gripped his wrist tight enough to nearly break it and pulled him up from the floor.  He just followed; he didn’t require any direction.

We burst out the back door into the pale, stark daylight. I figured at least one of the posse would be circling around back, so we had to move fast. I pulled the boy along into the thick woods and the foliage blotted out the sun. Until I figured it was safe to slow down and walk, we put as much distance between ourselves and the house as possible. I was breathing heavy and my heart was racing with adrenaline. The boy barely seemed winded. There was another shotgun blast in the distance. My guess was that Matthew was on the receiving end.

We walked through the forest together, footsteps falling softly on dead leaves, the light breaking through the canopy of trees at intervals that spotted the ground in an angelic light. I was still holding onto his wrist and he still had not said anything.  To anyone else, we would have looked like lovers.

“Are you hurt?” I asked, but he said nothing and just kept his eyes on the ground.

“You can’t go back home, can you?” I said.

“No,” he said.

“Was it bad at home?”

“They hate me there. They think there’s something wrong with me.”

I thought for a time. Judging by the posse, I figured the boy would just be another target in town, someone to be ostracized, laughed at and lonely. He might make it another year before he slit his wrists, especially after this whole incident.

“You wanted to go to the city?”

“Gilbert was supposed to bring me there.”

“But he didn’t?”

“He kept saying that he would…”

“Do you know anyone there?”

“I have a friend from here. He moved a long time ago. I miss him and he misses me.”

We emerged from the woods on the other side of the mountain, the gleaming white water tower high above us.

He couldn’t go back. Not to this place. Not to those people. He was lost, but not completely.

“Alright,” I said.
“It’ll be a long drive, but I’ll get you there.”

b
y Katherine Tomlinson

Nora had been working on the Congressman’s campaign for eighteen months. His neighborhood office was within walking distance of her apartment and going there every day gave her something to do with her unemployed hours; injected purpose into her otherwise aimless life.

She liked working at the small political outpost. The people there were smart and funny and talked about things besides who was favored to win
Dancing with the Stars
. No one was paid, so there was always free coffee and a seemingly endless supply of muffins and cookies and bananas.

Bananas were very filling and rich with potassium. Nora had read that potassium helped regulate stress, so she made sure she always ate a banana at some point during the day.

Nora had voted for the Congressman when he first ran for office on a law and order platform that challenged bad parents and bad teachers to mend their ways lest they produce a generation of bad kids. Two years later, there’d been talk of a Senate run, but instead, the party had anointed a young black guy with three adopted children and a wife who’d lost a leg working for Doctors Without Borders.

The kids were really cute and you couldn’t tell the wife had an artificial leg. It had been made for her by the same people who’d made Heather Mills’ prosthetic limb.
People in the party said the Senator was headed for big things; that he might go “all the way.”

If the Congressman was bitter, he didn’t share his disappointment with the public.
He was popular in his district, and he made the correct and crucial connections inside the Beltway, building a reputation as a guy the Party could count on to carry the banner.

He re-branded himself as a fiscal conservative and eventually landed a seat on the House Budget Committee. His constituents approved of his evolving priorities and he’d served four consecutive terms. It was widely assumed he'd have no problems holding on to his seat in the current election.

Nora liked the Congressman because he seemed to “get it.” His district had been hard-hit by the recession, and when he was re-elected in 2011, his campaign had been all about job creation and getting people back to work.

That was a message Nora wanted to hear.

Nora had lost her job in March of 2011 and things had been going downhill ever since. She quickly flattened the financial cushion she had saved. She hadn’t asked for alimony in her divorce settlement because she'd made decent money as a paralegal and wanted out of the marriage as fast as possible.

It soon beca
me apparent that her ex-husband’s insurance plan was much better than the coverage at the law firm where she worked though, and after a breast cancer scare that involved multiple tests, she was left with a large pile of medical debt that was getting larger by the month.

Fortunately, it had been a false alarm, and the lump just a cystic mass.

That was the only good news she got that year.

Nora lived on her unemployment benefits and updated her resume.

She moved into a smaller apartment and haunted online job listings.

She clipped coupons and went to every job fair the neighborhood had to offer.

She threw herself into social media, hoping to make a contact who could give her a lead on a job.

She lived off her credit cards and registered for temp work, but by the time all the fees and taxes were paid, she was only bringing home about $50 a day for those jobs and that just wasn’t enough.

She started selling things.

By the end of the year, Nora had become a citizen of what her ex-husband had sneeringly called “the other America,” a place where people existed without bank accounts; where mothers of many children bought cigarettes and booze with their food stamps and let their children go hungry. Nora knew it wasn’t true about the food stamps, because after an enormous amount of paperwork, she’d qualified to start receiving them and there were lots of things you weren’t allowed to buy with them. You couldn’t buy toothpaste or soap or toilet paper, for instance. And you couldn’t buy pet food either. Nora had given Jinka, her beloved Pomeranian, to a former colleague when she was no longer able to feed her.

That had almost killed Nora and the dog hadn’t been happy either. The ex-coworker later told Nora that she’d had the dog put to sleep because she wouldn’t stop barking.

Nora cried for a week, then called a lawyer friend to see if there was any way she could sue the woman for Jinka’s murder. The lawyer—not a dog-lover—had laughed and told her she could try, but that any judge he knew would throw the lawsuit out of court.

Barton, her ex, hated the dog and toward the end of their marriage had accused Nora of loving Jinka more than she loved him.

He’d been right about that.

By the beginning of 2012, Nora was getting desperate. Most of her friends were just barely hanging on themselves, stunned into shame by their inability to get so much as a response to their emailed resumes and carefully crafted job applications.

It had taken every shred of her limited self-esteem for Nora to go to Barton and beg for his help. In hopes of keeping their meeting civil and businesslike, she’d prepared a spreadsheet to show him where every dime of his loan would go. She’d brought a folder full of bills so he’d know she wasn’t just over-dramatizing.

He’d looked over the spreadsheet and then glanced at the contents of the folder, shaking his head at the overdue utility bills and the past-due warnings and the “final notice” messages.

“How’d you get into this mess Nora?” he asked with a hint of a smile Nora wanted to believe was sympathetic, but knew in her heart was simply mean.

“It’s not my fault,” she had whispered, and even as she said it, she knew it was the wrong argument to use with him.

“Tell you what,” he said. “I’m not going to loan you any money.”

Nora’s heart nearly stopped.

“I’m going to give it to you,” he said.

Nora’s relief was so intense that she almost threw up.

He watched her reaction and his smirk broadened into a real smile.

“But you have to do something for me.”

Nora just managed to stop herself from saying,
“Anything” and instead asked, “W
hat do you want?”

“I want you to blow me.”

“Okay,” Nora said. It wasn’t like she hadn’t done it before.

“Here,” he said and leaned back in his chair.

Nora looked around the restaurant he had chosen for their meeting, a place of dark wood and smoked mirrors and crisp, white linen tablecloths. It was the kind of place where they’d often eaten when they’d been married, a place where there were ten different kinds of steak on the menu and complicated desserts.

It was a restaurant where middle managers took their secretaries and then expensed the meal.

“You’re a bastard,” she said.

“And you’re a whore,” he said amiably.

And there was nothing she could say to that because that’s how she thought of herself too.

Nora had dropped her napkin on the floor and crawled under the table as if to retrieve it.

She had to work at getting him hard, and nearly gagged when he shot his wad deep into her throat. He’d come with an animal grunt he hadn’t bothered to disguise.

She emerged from beneath to the table to knowing looks and amused glances from the diners seated nearby.

After, he made her eat everything on her plate before pulling out his wallet and coun
ting out five crisp one-hundred-
dollar bills.

She’d been dismayed by how little he was offering. Her phone bill alone had rolled three times and was nearly four hundred dollars. If her service was cut off, she’d have to pay the bill in full, pay a re-connection charge, and also put down a deposit of $200 so the phone company could “secure” her account.

“Thank you Barton,” she had said and reached for the money.

“This is a one-time thing,” he said. “Don’t call me again.”

He received a text just then, and as he answered it, she gathered up her things.

He looked up as she stood.

“Sorry,” he said. “That was my travel agent. I’m taking Laura to Venice next month for her birthday. It’s going to be a surprise.”

She was outside the restaurant before the first tear spilled. That was good because she hadn’t given Barton the satisfaction of seeing her cry, but it was bad because everyone on the sidewalk could see the snot running from her nose and her mascara streaking because she didn’t have a tissue and she didn’t want to wipe her face on the sleeve of her suit jacket.

The suit was the last one she owned that still almost fit her, and she needed it for those times when she needed to camouflage herself as a normal person.

She mostly wore jeans and t-shirts at the campaign headquarters, cinching the jeans tight on her thin frame with a braided leather belt her niece had made at camp.

The leather belt had been a consolation prize.

Nora had asked her sister if she could lend her the money to fix her car’s transmission and her sister had hemmed and hawed and explained that after paying for camp and music lessons and riding lessons for her daughter, she didn’t have any cash to spare.

Nora had been furious with her sister and when the belt arrived in the mail with a chirpy note from her niece, a message that basically said, “I’m having a great time, sorry your life sucks,” Nora had considered just tossing it. But her days of throwing anything away were over, so she’d kept the belt.

When Nora heard that the candidate was going to visit his local campaign headquarters, it was exciting news. She wanted to ask him about the job creation plans he’d promised but hadn’t yet delivered on.

The night before the event, she hand-washed a white silk blouse and made a little red, white, and blue ribbon rosette to pin on the lapel of the red suit jacket.

She took extra care to wash and style her hair.

She polished a pair of Anne Klein pumps she used to wear to work, the only pair she hadn’t sold on eBay when it became clear that she was long-term, hard-core unemployable, and if she ever did get another job it would be the kind where a uniform was supplied to the employees.

The suit skirt was loose in the waist, but Nora fixed that with a safety pin.

With the white silk shell over the waistband, you couldn’t even tell.

“Lookin’ good Nora,” Lowell had said to her approvingly when she arrived the next day. “You clean up nice.”

Lowell was a kind man in his
seventie
s who came in to the office a couple times a week to work the phone banks on the candidate’s behalf. He’d told Nora that he wasn’t really a political man but that he needed something to distract him from the pain of losing his long-time partner to prostate cancer.

Lowell had been her Secret Santa at Christmas. They were supposed to stick to presents that cost less than $10 but he had given her a $100 supermarket gift certificate and a card that s
aid, “It’s our little secret.”
She’d recognized his shaky, old man handwriting.

She almost cried when she read the message, and to cover up she made up a story that the gift card was for a local sex shop. That made everyone laugh.

She’d made that gift card last until February.

“Thank you Lowell,” she said to the old man who was wearing what looked like a Hugo Boss suit—no doubt a relic from his past as a brand manager for a well-known liquor company, “you look rather dapper yourself.”

And that was true, Nora thought. You could tell he’d been a handsome man in his youth and even now, he had a certain “Most Interesting Man in the World” thing going on.

The Congressman’s press secretary arrived with binders and folders and packets she passed around.

“I know you’re all anxious to get some one-on-one time with The Man,” she said, “but he’s running late, so we’re going to have to limit your contact to a handshake and a quick photo.”

Geoff and Jeff, the two Poli Sci majors from Cal State Northridge, groaned. They were both wearing button-down shirts and ties with their jeans. They’d obviously dressed to impress.

“I know, I know,” the press secretary said sympathetically, and then she was distracted as the first of the local reporters arrived.

“The Man” himself arrived a few minutes later, smelling like breath mints and Marlboros.

His people worked very hard to make sure no one ever photographed the Congressman smoking, but he didn’t make it easy for them. The minute he retreated to his town car with the blacked-out windows, he was sucking down nicotine like he needed it to breathe.

The Congressman had a lot of charisma and even more charm. He had prepared a statement for the press and fielded some softball questions. Then a kid from a local micro-news blog asked him about his promise to generate jobs.

And the candidate blew him off.

He turned the question into a joke and started talking about “hard choices” and “fiscal responsibility” and “self-determination.”