Authors: Bill Loehfelm
Fresh Kills (32 page)
“Don’t go there, tough guy,” I said, standing in a hurry, bumping him, and a few others. “We’re done.” People shuffled a step or two away, glaring at me over their shoulders. I collected my possessions and stuffed them into my jacket. I had to get out of there, somebody was going to get hit. But Purvis still stood there, right in fucking front of me. We were practically chest to chest. My heart punched against my ribs like someone beating on a door. Pain crackled in my chest, jumping like electric current from rib to rib.
“Jaysus, don’t talk about me dear ol’ mum,” Purvis said, using a cheap Irish accent.
“Step aside, asshole.”
“Me poor sainted mudder.” Then, with venom, “What is it about you Irish and your mothers?”
My hands had risen into the small space between us. I could see my pulse beating in my wrist. There was suddenly no air at all in the bar.
Purvis lifted his beer bottle to his mouth and kept it there, draining it. His eyes smiled at me over the bottle. Sure he was asking for it. He couldn’t still think this was guy talk, that this was harmless fun. What was it about? When I beat him up? Was it about Molly? Julia? Or something else that had happened fifteen years ago that I couldn’t even remember? I felt my weight settle on the balls of my feet, my shoulders go loose. The reaction was unthinking, automatic, like sex, like that last second when orgasm can still be caught by the ankles, if everything just freezes where it is. But of course, it didn’t. Purvis had more to say.
“Your poor mother. A drunk, loser husband, a drunk, loser son, and a fuckin’ dyke daughter,” he said. “No wonder she fuckin’ dropped dead.”
TWELVE
LIKE WITH AN ORGASM, I DECIDED IF I COULDN’T STOP THE PUNCH, I might as well make it count. I had the advantage. I knew Purvis couldn’t even imagine me hitting a hero cop. I knew he was counting on that fact.
I made the fist on the way up and busted Purvis right in that big, stupid mouth of his. My middle knuckle tore open and his top lip split clean up to his nose. I felt the blood, his and mine, burst across the back of my hand. His knees buckled and he half-collapsed against the bar, clawing at it like a drowning man going under. I felt liquid and enormous, all-powerful, like I could throw lightning, with either hand. I feigned another right and dropped a left into his cheek like a fucking safe, like thunder. My arm snapped back beautifully; my fist reset like a machine. So I hit him again, this one coming all the way from my hips. I hit him fucking hard. Hard as I’d ever hit anyone; as hard, maybe, as anyone had ever hit me. His head bounced off the bar before he hit the floor. Face down, he didn’t move.
Arms locked around me as a bouncer and two other guys pulled me back against the jukebox. Sweat and tears slicked my face. They released me when I started throwing elbows, forminga semicircle around me. I wiped one leather sleeve across my eyes, paced the three-foot space I’d been given. The cop’s eyes fluttered open.
Purvis got to his elbows and knees. He puked on his hands. Spitting blood and booze and vomit, he staggered to his feet, putting his weight on the bar, not his legs. No one helped him up. He had his hand over his mouth but I could see the blood dripping off his chin onto his shirt. His right cheek and eye were already swelling. Good. He’d be wearing this one for a while. His eyes watered as he scanned the bar, looking for me. Someone slid a chair over behind him. He kicked back at it but couldn’t even knock it over.
Sluggish, hunched over, his eyes finding me, he reached behind his back. Don’t do that, I thought. Don’t be drunk and embarrassed enough to pull your gun. Please don’t be that stupid. What if you miss?
He brought his hand back around. His badge. I winced for him. I’d just dropped him, easily, in a crowded bar. Was now really the time to announce you’re a cop?
“You’re fucking in it now, Junior,” he yelled. “This ain’t kid shit no more! You’re fucked. Assaulting a cop? A detective? You’re fucked!”
He was beyond furious, but his threats rang out like high-volume whining. He may as well have been screaming, “I’m telling!” Just like he did when we were fucking kids. Several onlookers, witnesses now, I guess, had to cover smiles.
“Keep him here,” Purvis told the bartender. “He’s leaving in cuffs!”
The bartender offered to call him an ambulance. Purvis told him to fuck off. A cab to the emergency room? Purvis spat at him. He just glared at me over his shoulder as he pushed out the door. The bouncer locked it behind him. I got the feeling it was more to keep Purvis out than to keep me in. The bartender called me over. I had all the room I wanted at the bar. He set a shot glass on the bar in front of me and filled it.
“With me,” he said. “Long time coming, you ask me. Nobody ’round here likes that creepy bastard. Waves his badge around like it’s a ten-inch dick.” He refilled my glass. “That being said, I do have to keep you here until they come for you.” He tilted the bottle in his hand toward me. “Consider this a real casual citizen’s arrest. You ain’t gonna make it problematic, are you?”
I downed the shot. I’d spent the afternoon degrading myself in front of the two women I’d loved in my life, and, for happy hour, beat up a cop. No, I wasn’t going to make anything problematic. What was left for me to do? Start a fire for an encore? Even if I talked, or fought, my way out of the bar, they’d just come to the house. I’d done the only thing dumber than punching a cop. I’d punched a cop who knew where I lived. What was I gonna do then? Hide behind my sister? I thought about calling her, but why wake her up? What could she do? Nope. I wasn’t going anywhere. Except to the bathroom.
I ducked into a stall and locked the door behind me. I pissed, flushed, put the lid down on the toilet and sat. Elbows on my knees, I settled my head in my hands. The adrenaline hangover kicked in and my hands trembled against my sweaty forehead. I barely felt strong enough to hold my cigarette. Any omnipotence I’d felt beating on Purvis was gone. I knew if he came back, Purvis could wipe the floor with me. But he wouldn’t come back for me, even with backup. Maybe I’d get a ride to jail from the cop I’d met that afternoon.
I’d started the day begging to participate in my father’s funeral. I’d made a commitment to my sister; I’d joined what was left of the family. I’d taken my best friend’s advice on matters of death and the heart and gone to see Molly. Tried to have an adult conversation with my most recent ex. Tried to smooth over a falling-out with an old friend. I’d tried all day to be a grown-up. And where had all that landed me? Fucking jail. I figured I didn’t have to worry about what to say at the funeral. I’d be locked up in a cell when they put him in the ground. Maybe Purvis and Waters should’ve taken me in the afternoon of the shooting. It would’ve saved all of us a lot of trouble.
I’d been in jail once before. For trying to kill my father. Destroyed half the kitchen swinging at him with a tire iron. Broke his wrist. He broke mine in two places with his bare hands. And a couple of ribs. Waters only took me to the hospital after I started coughing blood onto the holding cell floor.
No one, not Waters, not Julia, not even my father, really believed I was trying to kill him. But I was. I wanted to kill him, but I couldn’t take him. That’s the shameful truth of it. They didn’t charge me with anything. My father wouldn’t press any charges. He told Waters he’d already taught me as good a lesson as jail ever would. It was a father-son matter that’d been settled between father and son, in the house, in the family kitchen—not ten feet from where he’d found my mother’s dead body.
left for graduate school, my father came home from work and found my mother sprawled on the couch, looking for all intents and purposes like she was taking a nap. But she was dead.
My father called Julia. My sister called me just moments before she broke down so completely she had to be carried to the campus infirmary. I was headed south on the expressway at ninety miles an hour probably before Julia even dropped the phone. I’d already drunk a half a pint of Jack Daniel’s that evening and I finished the rest on the way. I had a three-item agenda: kill my father, console my sister, bury my mother. The agenda was to be executed in that order, as swiftly and efficiently as possible. I ended up going one-for-three, but there was no lack of effort on my part.
I pulled into the driveway, ripped to the gills, and got the tire iron out of the trunk. The front door was unlocked.
My father sat at the kitchen table, half a bottle of Irish whiskey in front of him, the other half in his belly. He was smiling. I thought at the time I’d surprised him but I know now he let me have the first shot. Maybe he knew he had it coming. I swung for his head but then instinct and history took over and he blocked it with his arm. That was how I broke his wrist. Weapon and dead mother not withstanding, it was the same old situation.
Once he got the tire iron away from me, my father pretty much took me apart. The beating only stopped when the cops showed up. A neighbor had seen me careen into the driveway and enter the house with a weapon. I was cuffed and facedown in the front yard when Waters showed up. Ranking officer, he took control of the scene. The uniforms were only too happy to give it, and me, to him. I heard him joking with the other cops as he stuffed me into the back of his car.
“Put ‘blunt instrument’ down for the assault weapon,” Waters said. “On second thought, put that where it says ‘name.’ ”
My father stumbled up next to him, his wrist wrapped in a dish towel filled with ice. “Just put ‘pussy.’”
Waters stood toe-to-toe with my father. “For fuck’s sake, Sanders, quit breathing whiskey all over the neighborhood and get back in the fuckin’ house.” Then Waters took me to jail.
Julia didn’t make it to New York until the next day and by then I’d moved from jail to the hospital. She told me the broken ribs were a great chance to quit smoking. Then she slipped two packs of Camels into the leather jacket hanging on the end of my bed. She was obviously on sedatives, something strong to keep her upright. She pulled a chair to the edge of the bed and sat. She laced her fingers through mine and stared at our hands. Her eyes got wet and she told me, slurring a little, what the doctor had told her about our mother’s death.
My mother had lived for years with astronomically high blood pressure, undiagnosed, untreated, and unchecked. Eventually, one of the weaker, more badly stressed blood vessels in her brain just burst, like a pipe under too much pressure. Her heart killed her; her blood drowned her brain.
I asked Julia what the doctor had said about the cause of the hypertension. He hadn’t gone into that, but Julia guessed that it began around the time my grandfather, my mother’s father, got sick. He died slow, devoured from the inside out by a hideously patient stomach cancer, and my mother, her own mother having died only two years before, nursed her father through the final months of his life.
That was the first time she ever spoke of her sister, a woman named Kate. Not long after the wedding, Kate declared she wouldn’t speak to my mother until she got rid of her husband. They never spoke in person again. My mother sent Kate cards every year for her birthday and Christmas, until Kate moved and left no forwarding address. Julia and I saw Aunt Kate only once, right after my mother died, when she stuck around just long enough after the burial to spit in my father’s face. She never even introduced herself to us. My father told us who she was. I was so drunk at the burial, I thought I’d imagined the whole thing.
Laid out in a hospital bed and whacked on meds myself, I listened as best I could as Julia talked. She knew what I wanted and I knew she wasn’t going to give it to me. I wanted the accusations against him to come. I wanted the anger I knew had to be schooling somewhere in my sister to finally break the surface. I watched the side of her pretty face for shadows, for ripples, for anything. I waited, wanting the trial of John Sanders, Sr., in the court of Julia Sanders to finally, after all these years, begin. It never did. Instead, I got the long and elaborate defense of Susan Sanders, the gospel of St. Susan’s martyrdom, complete with Sister Kate as Judas. When Julia paused to wipe her eyes, I offered her my glass of ice water.
Whatever Julia wanted to believe about our mother was fine with me, but there was no way she could harbor illusions about the old man. She had
seen
him beat our mother, beat me. She had heard the same screaming, the same threats and curses that I heard. Unlike my mother, there was no pretense, no veils, to my father, no feigned smiles and dismissive sighs and thin excuses in which to root illusions. He was a demon, but he was an obvious demon.
seen
him beat our mother, beat me. She had heard the same screaming, the same threats and curses that I heard. Unlike my mother, there was no pretense, no veils, to my father, no feigned smiles and dismissive sighs and thin excuses in which to root illusions. He was a demon, but he was an obvious demon.
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