Love and Other Wounds (12 page)

“Fuck you!” Shermer says.

“Some other day, some other dude, maybe fuck me. But today it's you.”

Craig hammers down the shank with his palm. It splits Shermer's heart. He sees blood hit the ceiling. His brothers drop him to the floor and he sees nothing at all.

Tommy dreamed of whiskey sweet as Southern tea. The dream had no sense of place or sound. Just a bottle at his lips and swallowing. Great gulps filled him with booze until he was liquid too. He drowned in himself.

He woke up gasping, a man breaking the surface of a lake after a deep dive. He found himself in his bedroom. The sort of thing that shouldn't be a surprise. The sunlight came in low. It pulled shadows across the room. Dusk or dawn? He looked at the alarm clock. Saw the red dot. Dusk. Shit. He had to get ready. He had to get . . .

Geat.

Tommy listened. Nothing but the sound of blood rushing hard and loud in his head. The last time Geat had come up to St. Louis and crashed on Tommy's couch, his snores had woken
Tommy up in the next room. But now nothing. Tommy got up slow. The ache of his hangover went deeper than bone. He checked the couch. Maybe the gods who took care of drunk fools had put Geat there in the night.

No.

The blood in his head got louder.

Tommy covered his face with his big hands. They stank. He dug them into the hollows of his eyes. Tried to blot out the world. He took in air and tried to piece together what parts of the night he could remember.

He'd met up with Geat at the Pickled Punk the night before. Geat, the finest watchdog in the Ozarks. The two men had worked together plenty over the years. Folk in the bar gave them a wide berth. Two great big sons of bitches radiating bad motherfucker.

They took a table in a dark corner. Tommy talked quiet as the jukebox let him. He walked Geat through the job.

Geat had done a little work for Lambert before. He didn't need much to get the picture. Lambert bought junk from the Bosnians in South St. Louis. He stepped on it and sold it to the black kingpins in North St. Louis. Good clean business. Tomorrow night was the re-up. Tomorrow night, Tommy and Geat would take a duffel bag full of money down to Little Bosnia and pick up a duffel bag of junk and drive it back to Lambert's no-name bar on Dirtnap Avenue.

“I never dealt with no Bosnians before,” Geat said. “What're they like?”

“Same as anybody else,” Tommy said. “They won't fuck you over, long as you don't give them a chance to do it.”

Geat got it. He was a pro like Tommy. He knew a watchdog was like the man in the circus who worked with tigers. Every
thing goes fine, long as you never let them see you as a piece of meat.

They set to tearing the night down. One, two, three, four shots and a couple of beers. Nikki, the owner of the Punk, had laid one hell of a stinkeye on Tommy from behind the bar while she poured the last round of shots. But so what? She didn't have a say in his life. Not anymore.

They rode together in Tommy's truck to the Broadway Athletic Club. They watched kid boxers from folding chairs—the back row, close to the bar. Tommy switched to pale whiskey and Cokes. After the fights Tommy and Geat wandered onto the redbrick streets of Soulard. The night had rolled for them then. Like the world was fitted with ball bearings.

They'd wound up in some blues bar full of hoosiers. Tommy was getting numb. Started getting the itch. Nikki had been the one to name it in one of their fights near the end of it all. She called it the drunkard's paradox. Everybody's got their share of pain, even though it always feels like more than their share. Pain is part of the deal. Painlessness outside of death is an unnatural condition, she'd said. A man can't get to where he's feeling no pain for too long before it starts to itch at him. Before he starts to notice the hole where his pain's supposed to go. Pretty soon he starts needing the thing he was just running away from. Fiending for pain. That was Tommy, she said.

Geat made conversation with a table of men and women from South County. One of the women, a silver streak in her hair like Nikki's, leaned into her man and whispered something that made the man's eyes come alive with lust. Tommy, the itch burning now, told a joke. He told it loud, with fuck-you eyes for the whole table.

“How do you get a South County gal to suck your dick?” he asked. “Put ranch on it.”

The South County boys, filled up with liquid courage, got riled up. Geat tried to squelch it. Him and Geat had been outnumbered five to two. Bad odds for the South County boys. Tommy got the taste of raw hamburger and copper wire in his mouth. The taste of blood. His body's way of saying shit was about to go down. Like how an old-timer's leg ached and he'd know rain was coming. The soberest of the South County boys had gotten a better look at Tommy and Geat—jailhouse tats, gorilla hands, bodies built for violence, and eyes that had seen plenty of it—and got his friends to sit the fuck down. Tommy had laughed about it and taken another shot.

And there it was. That shot had been the one that cut off his mind from his senses. What happened after that might as well have happened to another person. A lot of Tommy's life was like that.

He popped aspirin, stuck his face to the kitchen faucet to wash them down. He gulped water. His throat burned. His tonsils were stomach-juice fried. He must have puked sometime when he'd been floating pilotless. He smoked a stove-lit cigarette hard, like it had the cure in it. He checked the fridge for the last beer, the one he knew he'd already drunk.

Tommy's cell phone showed a dozen missed calls from Geat. He felt hangover panic like jolts of electricity through his chest. Tommy hit redial. A lump of cigarette scum sat heavy in his throat.

“Hey there, motherfucker.” Geat's hillbilly twang got thicker when he was pissed. “A day late and a dollar short in the callback department.”

“Look—”

“That was a hell of a way to leave a man hanging. After you
split on me,” Geat said, “those South County boys got their mettle back. Five-on-one and all.”

“I split on you?”

“Yeah, man. I went out lookin' for you and they followed. Shit, I had to break some son of a bitch's arm to get them off me. Still got stomped pretty good.”

“Where you at?” Tommy asked. “We've got a job to do.”

“Ain't you got some nerve,” Geat said. “I'm back home now. I got the fuck out of St. Louis. Drunker'n hell, but I made it.”

The silence was loud. Geat was the one who broke it.

“What happened to you, man? You used to be class.”

He hung up. Tommy held the phone to his ear for a long second. Then he went looking for that phantom beer again.

The air felt hot and wet as dog's breath. Tommy kept the windows down. He drove downtown. Tried to sweat the poison out. Fought down the thing in his head that didn't want to think about the mess he'd put himself in. No Geat meant he'd blown the deal. It meant telling Lambert that he'd fucked up. Stomach acid brewed at the thought of it: Lambert with his eyes that never changed no matter what his face did. But Tommy had no choice. He had to come clean to Lambert, tell him he fucked up and needed another man.

His left arm ached. His fingertips soda-pop tingled. His breath drew hard. Classic heart-attack symptoms. Classic bullshit. His brain just gave him the signs of one sometimes on days like today. When he was half-poisoned with a fuckup hanging over him. When the real thing came he would most likely ignore it, thinking it was just his brain fucking with him again.

He turned onto Dirtnap Avenue. The street signs called it Napoleon Avenue. The street signs were wrong. This was Dirt
nap. Redbrick skeletons and fizzled-out streetlights. Gang graffiti and broken windows. Don't walk in the alleys unless you like getting drunk-rolled. A sign written in Nikki's hand had been stapled to the door of the Pickled Punk:
DO
NOT
PARK ON SIDE STREETS. YOUR CAR
WILL
BE STOLEN
. The sidewalks sparkled with broken safety glass. The kids around here loved stolos—stolen cars boosted for the pure demon fun of it.

Tommy opened the door to the bar. The stench of spilled beers and cigarettes rushed out to meet him. Five red-topped barstools and an Old Style sign above the bar. The stickers of a thousand dead bands papered the walls. Tommy slid onto a barstool. Nikki worked the bar. She still looked good to Tommy. Wet eyes, slick with life and the brains behind them. Hair, black and shining with one gray streak, poured down past her shoulders. Tits just starting to sag—but just enough to make them feel real when you took them in your hands.

It'd been years since he'd been able to do that.

Tommy and Nikki had been all fireworks—Roman candles pointed at each other's faces. They had raged. Lived hard, drank hard, fucked hard, fought hard. He needed the fireworks for the heat they gave him. Everything else in his life felt cold. But things changed, the way they do. He drank more, drank alone more. They fought more, fucked less. She loaned him money when things got slow with Lambert. He never paid her back. Neither said the thing: his end of the seesaw went down, hers went up. The rest of it was white noise. So it ended. A few years passed. They found their truce as bartender and regular. Old friends. But never that other, better thing.

“Where's your friend?” she asked now. Thoughts of Geat brought acid up the back of his throat. Refried his tonsils. Made him thirsty.

“Vodka. Double.” Odorless vodka. The secret drinker's best friend.

“At least say ‘tonic' for me, Tommy.”

“Sure. Tonic, why not?”

She gave him the drink. He pushed back a twenty. He made himself wait. She turned her back to him. Then he picked up the drink. He took it down fast. It ran cold-hot down his throat. Warm numbness spread. He opened his eyes to see her watching in the mirror behind the bar.

Lambert's place down the road from the Pickled Punk had been a bar once itself. The Black Goat. Brains and eggs specialty of the house. Now it wasn't really a bar. It was a lair. Still fully stocked with booze. Just missing customers.

Lambert and Meadows sat at the single table in the middle of the room. Tommy came in to the sound of their laughter. Meadows laughed with his whole body. Crooked-tooth grin. Lambert laughed every place but his eyes. Icebox cold. Nikki had joked that Lambert needed Meadows there to remind him of what humanity was like.

“Sorry, man,” Meadows said as Tommy sat down, “but I got to tell you, you look about half dead.”

“Just half dead?” Tommy said. “Guess I still have work to do.”

No laugh.

“Where's Geat?” Lambert asked.

“Running late,” Tommy said. He hadn't planned on lying, he lied to himself. “He found himself a little something-something last night, and I guess he's putting her through the paces. I'm going to get him on the way to Little Bosnia.”

Lambert just looked at him. Those fucking eyes. Like he fucking knew. But he didn't know.

“You know Geat,” Tommy said. “He's a pro. We're all good.”

“Need a piece?” Meadows asked.

“In the glove compartment.” Another lie. His nine-millimeter sat in his sock drawer. He'd forgotten it. A stupid lie. Meadows would have a gun. Hell, if Tommy came clean now, Lambert would probably send Meadows with him. All he had to do was say it.

He didn't say a thing. He let the moment pass. Lambert pushed the duffel bag over to him. It was done. Tommy sipped the whiskey before he left. He didn't gulp.

Well, maybe a little at the end.

Tommy hit Little Bosnia. The cash rode shotgun. Storefront signs turned from English to symbol salad.

Tommy pulled into the lot behind the restaurant, pushing his huge truck between two tiny Japanese sports cars lowered until they would scrape speed bumps. He looked to the shotgun seat. The duffel bag where Geat ought to be. The gunless glove box. He thought about driving away. Seeing how far that bag of cash could get him.

But he knew the answer. Not far enough.

He got out of the car and walked into the restaurant.

Families everywhere. Children ran between tables. Mounds of ash heaped in the ashtrays. Bottles bumped into plates of sausages and fried things. Parents shouted at the children. They shouted at each other. They shouted at the air itself.

The bar sat in back. Men in cheap-looking black suits. Smoking, drinking. A man in a bright yellow suit behind the bar. He smoked two cigarettes at once. He had scars on his face from some batshit Eastern European madness from whatever the fuck went down back there. Tommy knew him as Balic. He was the Man in Little Bosnia.

The men in black suits eyed Tommy as he slid up to the bar.
Tommy held the duffel bag between his knees. Anyone making a move would have to come through him to get it.

“Hey,” Tommy said.

Balic flashed brown teeth. A dog's threat as much as a grin.

“Hello, my friend!” he said, lifting a glass of blush liquor at Tommy. “Welcome.”

“You know why I'm here.”

“Yes,” Balic said. “And you will wait.”

“That's what you got to say, huh?”

Balic poured two shots of the blush liquor into highball glasses and pushed one toward Tommy. Tommy downed it and wiped his mouth. Some kind of fruit brandy. It burned like heavy fuel. Like one hundred proof. Balic waved at the crowd of families.

“You are early, is all. The merchandise is not yet here. We don't do business during business hours, you see? You will have a drink and wait.”

The glass of liquor filled in front of Tommy. He drank it. The bottle sat next to his right hand. He poured himself another. Lit a cigarette. He felt that thirst. The one that grew the more he drank. He gave it what it wanted. Plenty. It tasted like burning fruit. Copper wire.

One by one the families left. The men smoked and talked. They told jokes. They started telling them in English for Tommy's sake. The jokes had two idiots in them, Mujo and Suljo.

One of the men knew how to tell a joke. He's got one for Tommy, he said. Mujo and Suljo are walking home to their village after a raid by the Serbs. They find a head by the side of the road. Mujo looks at it and says, I think this is our old friend Naser. No, can't be, says Suljo. Mujo picks up the head and shows it to Suljo. Look at it, he says, this is certainly our old friend Naser. Impossible, says Suljo. Why is it impossible, Mujo asks.
Suljo points at the head and says, Because Naser is much taller than that!