Sinners Circle (9 page)

Walking down the hall, out towards
the car I can hear that guy in the bathroom screaming his head off, “Why’d you
bite
my fucking
dick
?”

After that there’s a lot of
crashing around, but once we’re outside Alison pukes in the bushes and says,
“Ok, I’m good to go.”

We leave Carl there and go back
to my place where we finish all the cocaine and have sex in the shower.

Carl
drops a cup of coffee on the counter, half of it running under the cash
register.
“Drink.”

I cough into my fist, look around
the store and sigh. “I don’t think I’m happy.”

“Who is?”

He pulls a few pussy pocket
keychains off the displays and shoves his finger inside until they break. I
crack my neck and scratch my stomach. “You think some
people,
they’re just different right... and maybe they are just meant to be alone. Like
forever and like, that’s how they’re supposed to be. That’s their role and
shit, yeah?”

Two fingers popping through two
keychain pussies, he looks up. “What?”

“I just mean—”

“No, I missed the whole thing.
What were you saying?”

Some fat asshole
who’s
been pacing in front of the store all morning catches
me looking at him, looks up and runs away. I can see where he stops, panting in
front of traffic.

I look at Carl; he’s pulling torn
bits of rubber finger pussy off the keychain. “I’m dying inside.”

He nods “I was flying last night,
too. Shit was crazy. Cops got called, that whole
fuckin
’
house got arrested. Where’d you and Alison run to?”

“We went back to my place.”

He drops the keychains on the
counter. “Do I have to pay for these?” The two dangling vaginas, they remind me
of the girl I left in my basement. I sewed a rat inside her to see what it
would do. After two weeks I thought it was dead, but then it came nibbling out
of her vagina. “No
worries,
buddy.”

He smiles, says something about
pants. I think of rats squeezing their ways out of a dead birth canal and
wonder if there’s any symbolism to be found there. I give Carl a hug before he
leaves, pat his shoulder and everything until Harry comes out of his shitty
little office to talk about nickels and quarters.

Harry shows me a piece of paper,
something about customer complaints or whatever. He shows me a list of lost and
misplaced items and then he tells me about the importance of cleanliness for
the sake of our female customers and then he stomps back into his office and I
hear the click of the door being locked from inside.

I don’t know why I’m still at
this job. But what else would I do? Work at a coffee shop?
Waitress?
At least here I can steal gag balls and dildos and never be suspected for it.
I’d quit, but I have no desire to work anywhere else, just as I have no desire
to work here. When I started working here I was earning eleven dollars an hour,
mostly because I was working nights, because we stay open twenty-four-seven on weekends.
After about a year I was going to go work at a shipping company, but when I
told Harry I was quitting he insisted on upping my salary. Now I make eighteen
dollars and seventy-five cents every sixty minutes and mostly work day shifts.
I have every second weekend off and I get three day weekends. Harry said it’s
because sales double on my shift and that he’d “have such a hard time finding
another girl as pretty” as me.

I guess I stay because the money
isn’t that bad. I also don’t have to pay rent as Marcy owns the house, and when
she dies the inheritance moves onto me. So it’s not that bad. I mean, it gives
me good stories to tell. But after those stories entertain you for five
minutes,
don’t forget that I have to go
live
that shit. It gets dull.

I do, however, have the
satisfaction of the upper hand in a way. For example, a man comes in here
trying to buy the sickest, dirtiest rotten shit that can be legally sold and distributed
within the United States. He comes in
here with such high hopes, but goes home with
Anal Invaders
or
The
Fist
Time: Volume Four
. He may get lucky with
Choked Sluts 7
, but I know that tape
will only go so far and then end. So I am satisfied with the fact that I have
over a dozen snuff films labeled only by snips of hair glued to the cassette.
Red heads, blondes, brunettes, but mostly just black hair. It feels good to
know that nowhere in the entire world is a collection like mine.

Maybe that’s why I stay. I’m a
silent overlord, secretly gloating in the faces of all those flabby cowards who
come wandering in here all alone, pathetic and horny.

“Two
years ago Teresa
Whitford
painted Jesus Christ’s face
black. Out of all the entries, hers was the only one with the Negro skin. It
lost, yeah; it got taken down before the judges even saw it. She was banned
from ever competing in the
Paint by
Numbers States
contest for life. But
Teresa is such a kind lady, so she came back to watch the next year’s contest.
And you know what she saw? Twenty five other Black
Jesuses
nailed on the cross and hung up on the walls.” Marcy throws her head back,
tapping her teeth with the end of her paint brush. “But Amanda, the whole thing
is not without irony because…” She leans toward me for effect. “The lady who
won last year—Maria Munoz—she was a Mexican lady who painted the Savior as a
Chinaman!” She slaps her wheelchair. “Can you believe it?”

I eye her cuckoo clock. “Weird.”

She taps the thin wood against
her teeth and mumbles, “A
Mexican,
too. I mean, aren’t all the Latinos devout Catholics?”

I shrug and wonder how many heart
attacks would ensue if I spray painted on every carefully crafted picture; a
big black cock on top of the withered and wasted loins of our Savoir on the
cross. I keep staring at the clock waiting for that bird to pop out and shriek
three o’clock.

“That’s too bad for Teresa, I
guess.”

She takes the brush off her teeth
and scowls, “Why?”

“Well... I mean she sort of
set the trend
, you know?”

“What?”

“Well, like, she set the trend
and the next year everyone was…” I laugh, slap the table, Marcy’s eyes shoot to
the paints. “Oh come on, Marcy...”

“
What
?”

“She paints a black Jesus and
gets booted, everyone else does the same thing the next year and then a Mexican
wins with her Chinese Christ?
Seems a tad unfair.”

“How?”

I shake my head and roll my eyes,
“Oh never mind.”

She shrugs and fills a circle
marked
nineteen
with Venetian red. “I
don’t see it.”

“Whatever, when’s this thing due
anyway?”

“What?”

“This thing, the painting.”
I fan a hand in the direction of
the Last Supper. “When’s it due?”

“The entry date?”

“Yeah, that.”

“Oh, not until June.
I have the next two months to do
it
perfect
.”

I nod, get
up,
look in the fridge for a Coke. There’s only rotten food and a bucket of compost
housing dozens of writhing maggots. I turn around. “Marcy...what’s this?”

Her shoulders slump a little, and
she looks so old. “I can’t go grocery shopping...”

“Well
yeah
but I thought we had that Danny boy come deliver for you. This
isn’t cool, you should have told me, I...”

“I don’t
need
you to do every little thing for me, Amanda.”

I look back in her fridge,
maggots slipping in and out of broken egg shells. “Marcy... what’ve you been
eating?”

She points with her paint brush
at a pile of Chinese noodle boxes, Pizza boxes, Wings, Pasta shells dried and
hardened fallen on the floor. “I call the restaurants when I need to.”

“What!”

“I
have
to eat sometime!”

“Yeah but...”

“And it’s not like
you’ve
been going to the grocery store
lately. I should be asking
you
the
same thing!”

“Well, I work a lot and go for
dinner at friends houses...” I think about the girl I’ve been eating for the
past month. The last time I was in a grocery store— about two weeks ago—was to
buy some lettuce for the rat I sewed inside her stomach. I ate spaghetti and
watched it wiggle out of her vagina. When he got out, the little fucker was
racing around my living room, darting here and there. It took me forever to
catch him. My intention was to see if I could keep him alive and strong enough
to sew him in again, so I bought lettuce. Sadly though, this killed the poor
little guy. “Marcy, eating out all the time is too expensive.”

“Well it’s not like
I
have many friends now,
is
it?”

“Marcy, I can cook for you.”

She looks like she’s about to
cry, but she bats away the tears and her face turns hard. “I don’t need you
wiping my ass and spoon feeding me. You have other things to
do,
I’d just be holding you back. You’d be married by now, you know that.” Her little
stringy fist bangs the wheel of her chair. “
You
are the child, not
me
.”

I close the fridge door and put
my hand on her shoulder. “You are not a burden to me.”

She freezes up, so I run my
fingers through her hair, pat her on the back. She takes a deep breath then
slowly relaxes. She pats my hand. “I know, dear. I just want you to live your
own life.”

“Marcy... you
are
my life. Please, don’t forget that.” I try my best to mean
this, but even as these words pass through my lips, and I can
feel
them warm her heart, I don’t mean a
word, because I’m wondering when she will die. My hand patting her shoulder,
stroking her hair, I’m actually wondering if she’s ever had an orgasm. I’m
wondering if Jesus really was black, or Chinese, and I’m fighting the impulse to
squeeze her shoulder, to see if I could break anything before she managed to
make me stop, or if she
could
make me
stop. “I love you, Marcy.”

She sighs. “I know, love. I
know.”

I clean her fridge while she
makes a grocery list. After I toss all the rotten apples and rancid meat in the
trash, and throw the compost in the back yard, I go to the grocery store and
buy all her food. The brunette bagging my purchases winks at me. She can’t be a
day over seventeen. I wink back and take Marcy’s stuff home for her. I cook her
spaghetti and help her get dressed for bed. We talk about plans for the trip to
the paint-by-numbers contest and she tells me all about men my age who attend.

“Some of them are real lookers.
You really ought to come this year.”

I nod, tuck in her blankets. “I
know. I will.”

I watch TV in her living room
until the cuckoo clock announces ten o’clock. I turn off the TV and check if
Marcy is asleep, then I drive back to Walgreens. I wait in the parking lot,
listen to the radio and smoke cigarettes until that brunette grocery bagger
girl comes walking out the door digging through her purse. As she gets closer
she waves, I roll down the window, “Hey! What are you doing here?”

She laughs. “Umm, I work here?”

“Yeah but, until this hour?
Don’t you have homework?”

She laughs again
.“
Yeah, I do actually. Wait, what are
you
doing here?”

I point to the video store across
the street.
“Waiting for my friend to get off work.”

“Oh. You know Dallas?”

I cough in my fist, looking
around the parking lot. No one is
here,
she’s close
enough to my car that I could pull her through the open window. “Yeah, that’s
my cousin.”

“Oh cool! That’s my boyfriend.”

The best I can do to not frown is
pull my face into a smirk. “Listen, you want a ride or something?”

She steps
back,
I could still hit her with the door before she broke into a run. “Well, I’m not
really going far.”

I point at the sky. “It’s pretty
dark, a lot of creeps out in the city tonight.”

She doesn’t say anything, so I
start the engine. “I’m
gonna
go get Dallas some beer
anyway, so if you just
wanna
come for the ride, I can
take you back to him after.”

Seventeen year old girls are so
dumb. “Oh! Sure!”

We don’t leave the parking lot. I
undo my seat belt as she straps hers on. I swing a screwdriver straight into
her windpipe, grab her hair and slam her head against the dash until I hear a
loud crunch. I break the fingers she tries clawing me with and I light a smoke
watching her as she slumps forward, her nose pouring like a bloody fountain
onto the garbage bags on the seat and floor. When all that stops, I undo her
seat belt and cover her with a blanket,
then
I drive
home.