Sinners Circle (7 page)

Around
eleven I’ve finished my coffee, I’m scratching my crotch and thinking about
wandering over to Alison’s and getting another cup if some jerk off doesn’t
come in here in the next five minutes.
Harry’s
in his
office, door wide open, chatting on the phone, his voice getting real loud
every time it’s his turn to speak. He’s talking about road trips and Chlamydia.
From way up here at the front of the store I can hear him tell the telephone he
pulled crabs out of his pubes and was scared at first that one had scuttled
down his
pee
hole.

I toss the empty cup into the
trash, stand and dig around the counter
for the ‘back in five minutes’ sign as soon as he shouts, “...sorry sweetie,
I’m all out of lube so this might sting a little.”
His feet
clapping the cement flooring of his office.

I can only imagine the kind of
guy on the other end of the
line,
I mean what kind of
weirdo talks this long to another man on the telephone? Let alone the subject matter,
such senseless banter as this. So, I get up to get coffee and ditch for a few
when Lilly comes limping through the door, her eyes all swollen up, lip split,
she’s got an arm wrapped around her ribs.
Her shirt torn from
collar to midriff, scratched knees weak and shaking in broken heels.
“Amanda...”

I barely catch her before she
collapses forward, “Lilly... what happened?”

Before she can speak she just
comes apart, crying and writhing in my arms, feet scraping the carpet. “They
jumped
me,
I got out of the car and...” I can tell the
way her wrist is twisted when she goes to wipe the snot from her nose that her
radius and ulna are fractured if not completely broken. “...two guys in the
fucking back, they were just watching me and him in the front… fuckers got me
in the alley. The car, the guy in the car just drove away. I think...”

Harry’s
laughing in the back, banging
his feet on the floor, his voice getting hoarse, “...she misses that rough cock
in her, semen dripping out of her, underwear pulled down to her ankles! Ask
her!”

I pick Lilly up, push the door
open and carry her to Alison’s work. Trisha is flipping through the newspaper,
circling ads when I kick the door open and lay Lilly down on the floor. She
screams, a few customers stand up, hover over and don’t leave until I push them
out. I grab the phone, Trisha tries pulling it away from me, “What are you
doing? This is a
business
line.”

“What’s going on?
Holy fuck!”
Alison grabs the phone from Trisha, dials nine
one
one
. “There’s a girl! A fucking girl looks like
she’s going to die...”

“Amanda?” Lilly’s twisted little
arms are waving in the air above her. I grab a cup of water and wrap my arms
around her shoulders, I can feel her getting colder and in the eighteen minutes
it takes for the ambulance to arrive I never move my face from her hair.

When the paramedics load her up
on the stretcher and all the onlookers watch the ambulance speed off, Harry is
standing there, arms crossed, staring at me. “You left the store unattended.”

I look down at myself, the front
of my white t-shirt is all wet, scrunched up and smeared in blood.

“... And you’ve got blood on your
shirt.”

“She might die.”

“You should’ve told me.”

“You were on the phone.”

He sighs, “Someone could have
come in and taken shit. You have to let me know if you’re...”

“She was
gonna
die,
asshole.”

“Hey!”

“Fuck off.”

I push past him and head back to
the store.

“You can’t talk to me like that,
I’ll...”

“Fuck off.”

He follows me in, points at my
shirt again. “I can’t let you work in that.”

“
You telling
me to go home?”

“No...I just...” He unfolds his
arms, scratches the back of his neck and waves a hand towards his office. “I
got a bunch of tank tops in the back. Find one that fits and come back to the
front.”

His little janitor closet turned
office smells like wet paper and old garlic. I’m digging through a cardboard
box, ‘
titty
tops’ scrawled in red marker on the side
in
Harry’s
handwriting. The office is so damn small I
knock over a stack of magazines piled beside the desk. I quickly slip on a
black tank, ‘Hustler’ spelled out in gaudy rhinestones, and bend down to pick
up the skin rags. Half of them are water logged, pages swollen. Under the desk
it reeks like piss. I’m just grabbing the last magazine off the floor when I
notice the phone cord isn’t plugged into the jack. I look on top of the desk
and see the receiver off the hook. I plug it back in, stand up and push call
history.
According to this, the last phone call
was made today at seven thirty AM. One missed incoming at nine o’clock. I look
at my watch. It’s four fifty seven PM.

“Amanda?” Harry is shouting from
the front of the store.

“Yeah?”

I unplug the phone again and lay
the receiver back on its side.
There’s
five long black
strands of hair laid out beside the keyboard of his computer. I touch my scalp,
pluck out a hair and hold it up to the bulb on the ceiling.

“You finding everything OK?”

I’m squinting one eyed to make
sure I’m right, that I’m positively correct.

“Yeah... I found everything.”

I walk back to the till. “You OK,
Harry?”

He shakes his head. “No.” He rubs
his belly and laughs. “I’m hungry enough to eat a whore.”

I make sure I pace my blinking
and breathing to his. “Oh?”

“Yep.”

He scratches the back of his neck
again and points at my top.
“Looks nice.”

“Ok.”

“Well, I’m
gonna
head off to McDonalds. You want anything?”

“No, I’m not hungry.”

“Come on, you look thin. I’ll
bring you back something.”

“No, I’m not hungry.”

He shrugs.
“Fine.
Go for your lunch when I get back.”

He goes to his office, gets his
coat and leaves out the back door. The second he leaves I crack my neck, grab
the sandwich out of my lunch bag and look through the newspaper to see if the
remains of the jogger have been discovered yet. I’m sort of pissed when I see,
after two goddamn
weeks,
there still hasn’t been a
missing persons notice. I wipe the crumbs off my stomach and wave at Trisha
when she gets in her car outside the store. She holds a thumb up to her ear, a
pinkie to her mouth. I smile and swallow the rest of my sandwich.

“That chick.”
Alison is pointing at a group of
people bobbing their heads at a table. I crane my
neck,
I don’t see anything except wig hair and black clothing. She pulls me next to
her, aiming her arm like a rifle.
“That one, that chick right
there.”

“Ok.”

“You see her?”

She’s pointing at a tired looking
thirty something, slug lips and low tits.
Bad sweater, cheap
jeans.
“Sure.”

She doesn’t lower her flesh
rifle, just keeps on pointing it straight at cheap jeans. “She looks like
Octomom
.
Except, minus the sort of
looking like Angelina Jolie part.”

I laugh, peel the label off my
beer and scatter the shreds of paper across my lap, her lap. “I saw a dyke down
here once
who
looked like Dan
Aykroyd
.”

“Gross.”

Carl and some scrawny wired
looking fag sit down, I take a shot glass from him and he rolls his eyes, digs
in his pocket for baggies of meth.

“Yeah it was gross.”

Carl wraps
an
arms
around Alison and scratches his nose. “What was gross?”

“I was telling her about the
Aykroyd
dyke. The time we saw that big…”

He laughs and whips the edge of
the table with his finger tips. “Oh
shit
yeah!
She was—
it
was—sitting all alone,
looking sad and nervous... kept fucking around with her medical bracelet. Like
twisting it around and shit. So pathetic, hunched on a stool at the bar
drinking wine, by the end of the night I wanted to slap her. I mean fuck,
having to follow her up those stairs to the street, I was like ‘some of us have
people to actually take home and have sex with, move loser.’ They shouldn’t let
those things in here.”

The skinny fag, he’s pulling out
little paper envelopes, tiny plastic bags, turning them upside down in his palm
and then tossing them on the floor. After a full minute of watching him do this
I poke him in the arm, “You got a name?”

He looks at me like I’ve slapped
his baby. “
Don’t
fucking
touch
me! I don`t
wanna
drop this shit.”
He even shakes his hand a little for emphasis.

Carl points a beer bottle at him,
“Oh Amanda this is...”

I roll a wad of phlegm from the
back of my throat and launch a perfect gob onto this skinny fucker’s cheek.
“You got a name?”

Even with a ball of spit and
throat gunk dripping down his cheek, he doesn’t move, just keeps pulling out
flaps of meth, coke, who knows what he’s got pinched in there. Whatever it is,
it’s probably so cut
it’s
more cupcake mix than drugs.
He just stares in his hand, dumping empty little bags and throwing them at his
shoes. “Ronnie.”

Alison shakes her head and tosses
Ronnie a napkin. He doesn’t touch it but flinches as it lands by his hand.

Carl looks over at the table, the
one where
Octomom
is, or was. “Where’s that
cunty
waitress? The blonde one... the one with the...” He
cups an invisible tit.

I shrug. Ronnie doesn’t do
anything,
he’s dumping more baggies into a small mountain of
powder growing in his palm. Thing is though, he’s sweating almost as fast as
the mound is growing, salty
perspirant
quickly
dissolving his drugs into goop. I’d say something, but I am sort of curious to
see if the chemicals will absorb into his system through his skin.

Alison looks at me, then at
Ronnie, then at me, then at Carl. Her eyes wide, her mouth pulled down, she
doesn’t look very attractive. “You guys are
fucking
kidding me!”

She does the look around thing
again. I just keep shrugging and Carl doesn’t even notice she’s mad until she
punches him in the arm, hard. “You
fucks
! She was
murdered
!
It was on the news and everything. Last night was some fund raiser where half
the profit from drinks went to her family...”

Ronnie slams a palm of wet drugs
into his mouth and licks white slime dripping down his wrist. Carl looks at
Alison, Carl looks at me,
Alison
looks at me. Alison
says, “
Amanda,
didn’t you fuck her or something?”

Ronnie is licking pigeon shit
amphetamines from between his fingers, his eyes rolling like goddamn pool balls
between us. I crack my neck, brush some of the peeled beer label scraps off my
lap, “Well, I...”

“Oh my...
fuck
...” Ronnie, his whole face goes beat red,
then
totally pale and then hits the table, white drool pooling out the side of his
mouth, it looks like an unending stream of semen. From the way his body isn’t
moving, the rim of his lips tight and grey, eyes locked open you don’t need to
be a doctor to know he’s having a heart attack.

Carl plays hero, he tells
everyone to call an ambulance, he says he’s a nurse and helps a drag queen, who
flashes his MD ID around, save Ronnie’s worthless life. The ambulance comes,
takes Ronnie away, Carl goes with Dr. Drag, and when the lights turn back off
and the music starts up again, it’s just me and Alison. We do shots at the bar
and I try talking about movies I’ve seen lately, but Alison won’t talk about
anything except Lilly and Ronnie and then eventually how much I should give
Trisha a call.

“She likes you, she really likes
you.” She’s got tears in her eyes and her hand never leaves my leg when she’s
saying all this. Every time she says ‘likes you’ her fingers get tense and it
makes me really wet when she’s crying on my shoulder in the taxi home because I
can feel her breath on my ear. When we’re just about at my house, she puts an
arm across my stomach and swallows my earlobe.

And when I take her home and fuck
her, it’s not because I’m a bad friend, it’s because I’m a bad person. And I
don`t even think about Carl across the city, breathing life into some gay
stranger as I take off all of his girlfriend’s clothes, keeping my mouth moving
over hers so she can’t voice any second thoughts. I don’t think about our long
standing friendships because Alison has this really tight pussy and she doesn’t
tell me to stop when I can tell it’s hurting her.

I fall asleep as the sun rises
and when I wake
up,
Alison is standing over me half
naked and wearing that jogger’s
University
of Oklahoma
sweat shirt. She’s holding a plate of toast and scrambled
eggs. She kisses my forehead, sits down
on the bed and hands me the plate but not the fork, because she’s drumming it
on her bare knees. “Look, I don’t regret last night or anything but, let’s just
keep this between us, OK?”

I smile. “Yeah, OK.”

“Thanks.”